Gmail and GMail Notifier

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Oct 24, 2008 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

One of the very first things I tell new virtual assistants and members of my team is to lose the Yahoo and Hotmail accounts and signup for a free Gmail account if their business website or blog is not hosted on their own domain. Never, never, never use these free accounts as your business account. To be blunt about it, when I see a business using a free email account, particularly a Hotmail account, I immediately think: “this business doesn’t care about email, or using the internet to communicate with their customers”, and I don’t take them seriously.

Now I admit that I have several Yahoo and Hotmail accounts but these are used for subscriptions, newsletters, and junk. If you don’t have your own address at your own domain, the next best thing is to signup for a Gmail account, add a professional signature and use that as your business email address.

Once you have your email account set up you can download GMail Notifier which is a handy little widget that sits in your system tray and alerts you when you have new messages in your Gmail account. This way you don’t have to remind yourself to login several times a day to see what is going on. The appearance of the icon popping up at the bottom of your screen will ndicate that new messages have arrived and all you have to do is right click on the blue icon envelope in your system tray and you will be taken directly to your email account. As new messages arrive, you will see their subjects, senders, and exerpts of the message show up which is very helpful if you are waiting for an important message.