Here are a few things you’ll want to know about GMAIL that aren’t clearly communicated, or easy-to-find, in their Knowledgbase:

1) You can use your @yourdomain.com address to send and receive email. Yes, that’s right.

I use GMAIL and when I send email it sends as and comes from chris@jaegerinteractive.com.

While you WILL have an address <something>@gmail.com that is not the only address you have to, or can, send from.

You can configure GMAIL to collect email from multiple (unlimited) email boxes.

You can configure GMAIL to send email from up to five different email addresses.

So you can take advantages of all the GMAIL features and still send email from the  address you want to, which in most cases should be <your first name@<yourdomainname.com> (i.e. chris@jaegerinteractive.com).

2) GMAIL collects email from your exisitng POP account on your hosting server… but does it based on it’s own timing scheme.

In other words, it doesn’t collect and update your inbox every 60 seconds, or every 10 minutes even.

GMAIL “figures out” how often your email box gets email and then automatically schedules a “check for new  email” based on it’s own calculations.

So, you can’t set your email to be checked and collected every 60 seconds, or every 3 minutes.

If you want to FORCE an email “collect” from your GMAIL account

Select Settings (top, right-ish)
Select Accounts
Look for Get EMAIL from other accounts
Click on the “check now” link

3) Searchability

As you might expect, Google makes it incredibly easy to search previously sent and received emails for specific keywords or keyword phrases. Simply use the search option at the top of your GMAIL screen and voila - you’ll have a results page with all the emails you’ve ever received or sent with the matching keywords and/or keyword phrases.

This feature alone is a reason to convert to GMAIL - but there are many others.

Give it a try. Say goodbye to Microsoft Outlook. I’m sure you’ll love GMAIL and never look back.