Using Gmail for YourDomainName.com

Did you know that Google makes it possible for you to use Gmail on a personal or business domain name? It’s called Google Apps for Your Domain, and if you already have a domain name, it’s completely free for up to 50 e-mail addresses!

It’s a little bit technical, but I wanted to share the steps here for you to set this up for yourself!

1. Buy your domain name. There are a variety of domain name providers out there, some cheaper than $10/year, depending on the services you want and whether you’re comfortable with managing the domain yourself.
2. Get access to your “DNS” settings. DNS is a little bit like a giant phone book. It translates friendly names like “aaronklein.com” into the numbers that represent the particular servers that host my web site. It also establishes where the e-mail sent to that domain name will be routed to. You’ll need access to edit your DNS settings to tell your mail to go to Google’s servers.
3. Establish your Google Apps account. You can sign up for Google Apps Basic (the free version limited to 50 e-mail boxes) completely free.
4. Update your “MX” records. In your Google Apps account, they’ll give you a list of “MX” records to put into your “DNS” (MX stands for “mail exchange” and that’s how the internet knows to send your mail to Google’s servers). You put in more than one so if one of Google’s servers are down, your mail keeps flowing.
5. Verify your domain with a “CNAME” record. Google Apps will ask you to verify your domain name to ensure you actually own it. They’ll give you a special code to create what is called a “CNAME” record. You do this in the same place you put your “MX” records…by editing your DNS settings.
6. Create your Google mailboxes. In the Google Apps administrator app, you can create up to 50 different user accounts (which double as e-mail boxes). You can also create “aliases” (for example, if you want jim@jim.com and j-dude@jim.com to come to the same mailbox, you can create a mailbox called jim and an alias for that mailbox called j-dude).

That’s it! You’ve now got Gmail for your own domain name. Enjoy.

Getting to Inbox Zero: It Can Be Done

I deal with a huge amount of e-mail every day…usually 300-400 messages. A lot of those are spam, and many of them are not messages that require my personal attention, but I still manage to get my inbox to zero about once a week.

(There are some people I know who can do this once a day. Once in a while, I wish that I could do that — and once in a while, I do — but for the most part, getting to Inbox Zero on Friday afternoons is an achievable goal that still takes a lot of hard work to accomplish.)

So how do you get to Inbox Zero? I thought I’d share my tips for how I accomplish it. (This certainly has roots in the Getting Things Done methodology, but not all of that works for me, so this is my twist on it.)

Laying the Foundation

First, from my perspective, you can’t do Inbox Zero unless you have a task list. Whether it’s a to-do list on paper, Outlook tasks, or some other way of tracking your to-dos, it’s a simple fact that many of the e-mails you receive create work for you to accomplish.

You may say, “my inbox is my task list…every e-mail I leave there represents something I need to do.” Two points in response: first, it’s mixed in with a lot of other stuff, and that’s bad organization. Second, you’re wasting huge amounts of valuable time “reinterpreting” the e-mail into your action item over and over again. With a separate task list, you can do that once and it’s done forever. Don’t underestimate how many mental cycles you’re wasting trying to remember what you were supposed to do in response to that e-mail with the subject line of “Hey Bob” that is actually about the annual report.

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Want to (Almost) Get Rid of Voice Mail?

I really dislike voice mail. So much so that my outbound voice mail message suggests you send me an e-mail if it’s urgent to reach me.

For those who still leave me voice messages, I’ve recently replaced my standard-issue cell phone company voice mail, first with YouMail, and then with Google Voice. As a result, my voice messages now come to me as e-mail (or SMS text) messages with an imperfect, but good enough, transcription of the message.

First, YouMail. It’s a great service. It will cost you about $6 per month to get basic transcription service, which only covers the first 15 seconds of the first 50 messages you get every month. It’s a nice service and I’d use it again.

That said, Google Voice is also great, and it’s free. They just added transcription, and while the transcription quality is nowhere near as good as YouMail, it’s probably good enough for most.

Here’s the thing about Google Voice: they intend you to change your phone number, and have people calling your Google number to then ring into your mobile or office phones. That’s great if it works for you, but I simply wasn’t in the position to change my number.

So instead, I forwarded my cell phone voice mail to my Google Voice mailbox. Here’s how you can do it with your carrier (replace 5305551212 with your Google Voice number in the instructions):

• AT&T: *004*15305551212#
• Verizon: *715305551212
• Sprint/Nextel: Call customer service and request they change your forwarding
• T-Mobile: *004*15305551212#

If you decide to change your mind and go back to your regular voice mail, here’s how you do that as well (replace 5305551111 with your cell phone number):

• AT&T: ##004#, then *004*15305551111#
• Verizon: *73 or *710
• Sprint/Nextel: Call customer service and request they change your forwarding
• T-Mobile: ##004#, then *004*18056377243#

Enjoy (almost) no voice mail!

The Best Way to Archive E-Mail

I’m a heavy user of e-mail — between 300-400 e-mails a day. There are some definite strengths and weaknesses to the different e-mail platforms.

My primary platform is Microsoft Outlook, and there are some key strengths there. First, it’s the best way to connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Exchange integrated with BlackBerry is the best mobile e-mail solution on the planet, bar none. (If anybody disagrees, let me know and I’ll write a blog post to foster that debate!) One of the other big strengths with Outlook is that you can use the natural motion of drag-and-drop to attach files to messages, or save messages inside tasks, etc.

My secondary platform for almost all of my other accounts is Gmail, or more accurately, Google Apps (which lets you use Gmail for your own domain name, like aaronklein.com). The Gmail platform has some great strengths too: low costs, incredible speed, amazingly good search (it applies Google’s search technology to your e-mail), and you don’t have to worry about storage space or backup — it’s all in the cloud.

Of course, each platform tries to compensate for the other’s strengths. Google is increasing integration with BlackBerry, but it’s still not nearly as good. Outlook 2007 is now integrated with Windows Desktop Search which is exponentially faster than before, but it doesn’t scale…Outlook still slows way down when you have more than about 2GB of data in a file.

To solve that problem, Outlook has an AutoArchive feature that will transfer older mail to a different Outlook data file. The problem is, that Outlook file will eventually get quite large too. If you leave it open, it slows Outlook down. If you close it, it won’t be indexed by Windows Desktop Search, so it’s practically useless.

What I realized is that I can get the best of both worlds by transferring mail from the Outlook world to the Gmail world as a permanent archive: it lets me shrink my Outlook data files to a manageable size, and keep my archived mail very searchable, accessible and stored in the cloud.

As a sidebar: I don’t keep all of my e-mail messages. There are several organizations I’m involved in where e-mail retention policies are established that determine when messages get deleted. But I end up archiving much of my personal and work related e-mail, and some categories of messages date back to 2002.

Here are the steps I took:

1. I downloaded Google E-Mail Uploader. This only works with Google Apps accounts that run on your own domain name, and won’t work with a Gmail.com account (hopefully they’ll remedy that soon).

2. I created a new Outlook data file. To do that, click on Tools / Account Settings, go to the Data Files tab and click Add. Make sure to name this file something like “Mail to Archive” so it doesn’t get too confusing!

3. I moved the messages that you want to archive from your main folders to that new data file. For safety, I selected the e-mail I wanted to archive, and held down the Ctrl key while dragging it into the corresponding folder in the new data file so that it would copy the messages.

(After verifying that they copied successfully, I then went back and deleted those messages in the primary folder…and then I emptied the deleted items. But I really didn’t want to lose those messages!)

So at this point, you should have the mail you want to archive in the new data file, and all of the mail you want to keep in Outlook in your main data file. I chose November 2008 as my cutoff, and figure that by the next time I need to archive, I’ll know whether to keep 12 or 18 months in Outlook.

4. I launched Google E-Mail Uploader. After closing Outlook, I could select the archive folders I wanted to upload, and it started. The tool preserves your folders by creating the corresponding labels in Gmail. The entire process took 22 hours for about 3.5GB of e-mail messages, but I could easily pause the process, exit the uploader tool, and restart the process later without missing a beat.

Voila! Years of e-mail stored safely online in the Gmail platform. I can easily search it and find old messages, and forward them to my current account if needed.

Have you tackled this problem before? Any twists on this idea that could make it easier for people?