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IMAP email solutions from Big Trousers
Posted on 03. Sep, 2010 by Philip in Big Trousers News, Software
With the current trend towards mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad and the slew of Android based systems to be released, most small businesses are struggling to find a workable solution to email. Using a regular POP3 account requires that you keep email on the POP email server as part of your web hosting account until all your devices have received email. Usually this means one device is set to delete from the mail server and the rest are set to not delete. While this sort of works for two devices like laptop and desktop, it gets way more complex when a phone is thrown in. What clients have asked for is a way to send and receive email from multiple devices and have their email accounts in sync including sent mail. Your complete audit trail of email communication needs to be available as one on all devices you use. Your list of contacts should also be in sync automatically so that you enter once and use from any device.
Whilst there are numerous ways around this problem including forwarding, aliasing, and other solutions, none are perfect or platform agnostic and some feel like a bit of a hack. You could spend a hefty sum on an Exchange server and incur ongoing support fees even but for most small business this is a thing of the past.
Enter Google and their growing suite of Cloud based solutions.
Big Trousers has recently started an association with Google as a Google Apps reseller and as such can provide solutions like domain based IMAP email for your business. Whilst IMAP appears similar to POP3 in some ways it requires substantial server resource and storage. A Google Apps IMAP account gives you 25 GB data storage and state of the art spam protection and security. All this and your email address need not change from you@yourdomain.com. This service is what a Gmail account does but with your domain and email address.
Email is synchronised automatically on any device set up with the account. That is as mail is deleted on a laptop it is automatically deleted from a desktop regardless of whether one is using Outlook, iPhone Mail app or whatever. Sent mail remain in sync regardless of which device sent the email. Contacts are synced also. There is also a webmail interface that is available for when you have to use some other device via a browser and still in sync.
Accounts cost US$50 per year. If you host your domain with Big Trousers currently then there is no set up fee for the account. A fee to set up imap server ports and ssl on various devices may be required however if you are not comfortable doing this yourself. We can provide a help document for various devices however at no cost.