Sneaky Gmail thinks it knows your email better than you do, so they’re rolling out some major changes to how your inbox will appear.

This means the business tips and videos I make for you might get lumped into it’s own “Promotions” tab and out of sight. Boo!

I don’t know about you but I already filter my own emails, thank you very much. 🙂

Here’s how to fix it so you don’t end up losing out of time-saving, client-attracting, systemizing, and delegating ideas from me…

How to Tell Gmail “I’m a Solopreneur and I Do What I Want” 

If you’re like me and you create your own email filters like an adult, you can change this setting now by doing this:

(If you already have the new settings rolled out in your Gmail inbox, you’ll have 3 tabs along the top: “Primary”, “Social”, and “Promotions”.)

To turn off tabs in your Gmail inbox and see all messages in one list:

• Click the ‘+’ sign to the right of the rightmost tab in your Gmail inbox. (probably the ‘Promotions’ tab)
• Make sure all tabs except Primary are not checked under Select tabs to enable.
• Click Save.

Congrats, you have now gained back your traditional inbox and control over your own email filters.

See you in a few days with a brand new business-building article and resources you’ll love!

You can set up he Google Apps in your iPhone.  To do so follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings application on your device’s home screen.
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Press Add Account….
4. Select Microsoft Exchange.
5. In the Email field, enter your full Google Account email address 6. Leave the Domain field blank.
7. Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username.
8. Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
9. Tap Next at the top of your screen.
9a. Choose Cancel if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears.
10. When the new Server field appears, enter m.google.com.
11. Press Next at the top of your screen again 12. Select the Google services (Mail, Calendar, and Contacts) you want to sync.
13. There are three options for keeping your contacts synced.
13a. If you would like to keep your existing contacts on your device select the Keep on my iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch) option when prompted.
13b. If you have all your contacts in Google and you want to start syncing them to your device and don’t want to keep the contacts on your phone, tap Delete Existing Contacts.
13c. If you have all your contacts on your device and want to import them into Google, you can synchronize your Google Contacts with iTunes.

This is shown on the Google Support Article: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740.

Check out ‘whatsnew.googleapps.com’ for up-to-date launches and product improvements.

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppsUpdates or email alerts at http://www.google.com/apps/admin-updates

Note that you will need to manually verify each account that you are bringing into Google Apps so you must have access to those account.

Sending emails from other accounts using Google Apps by creating a Send mail As configuration. You can create send mail as configuration you will have to do the following steps:

1. Sign in to the Google Admin panel.
2. Find the user account. You can either search or browse:
Search: Enter the user name in the search box at the top of the Google Admin panel, then click Search accounts.
Browse: Click the Organizations and users tab. If you created an organizational structure, select an organization from the organizational structure on the left.
3. Click the row for the user account to display the user information page.
4. Click Add a nickname.
5. Enter the user name in the Add a nickname text box. The user name will be the portion of the user’s email address that appears before the @ sign.
6. Select the domain for the nickname. If you have secondary domains associated with your Google Apps account, the field to the right of the @ sign is a drop-down list with the available domains. The domain you select will be the portion of the user’s email address that appears after the @ sign. (If you have a domain alias for your primary domain, every email address in the primary domain automatically has an email alias address in the alias domain.) 7. Click Save changes. It can take up to 24 hours for the alias to become available.

For more information please refer to http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182527.

Using Mail Fetcher to receive email from other accounts. To use mail fetcher you simply have to follow these steps:

1. Access your Google Apps Mail Inbox.
2. Click on the Gear sign.
3. Click on Settings.
4. Click on Accounts.
5. Scroll to the Option Check mail from other accounts (using POP3) and click on Add a POP3 mail account you own.
6. Enter the previous email address.
7. On user name type the full email address.
8. Put the Password.
9 On POP Server type the server for the domain which should be the incoming pop server of the previous host and use port indicated by their service.
10. Click on Add Account.

For more information please refer to support article https://support.google.com/mail/answer/21289?rd=1

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppsUpdates or email alerts at http://www.google.com/apps/admin-updates

I’ve taken the plunge and moved my entire life in MS Outlook to Google Apps for Business.  I’m going to chronicle my ‘journey’ and hopefully shed some insight for others contemplating the move.

Migrating Outlook to Google

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook® is a desktop utility that lets Microsoft Outlook® users import your existing mail, personal contacts, and calendar events from a Microsoft® Exchange account or PST file into any Google Apps account. You can configure and run your migration by stepping through an easy-to-follow wizard. You can also run the utility as a command line tool.

With Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook®, you can:

• Import mail, calendars, and personal contacts, either all at once or in separate stages
• Import only mail sent before or after a specific date
• Skip importing Junk E-mail and Deleted items
• Exclude specific mail folders from being imported (requires running the command-line utility)
• Monitor the progress of your migration
• Easily pause and resume the migration
• Run subsequent migrations that import only new data (not data that’s already been imported)

For me, this tool a LONG time.  I’ve been using Outlook for 14 years and may NOT be the best at deleting old emails that I have stored in files.  To migrate the emails alone it took 12 hours.  In the end the migration failed at 92 % but when I went to Google email it seems like almost everything was there.  Time will tell what didn’t get moved but according to my research it is mostly email with very large attachments.

A couple things to note:

Folders –> labels in Google.  The labelling system did not translate perfectly but it only took about an hour to re-label things to suite my needs.

Contact:  Yikes!!  Even though I THOUGHT I only had a single contact list, multiple entries of each contact were imported.  Luckily Gmail has a ‘merge contacts’ function on 2 levels that helped:

• Find and merge duplicates, or
• Manually select ‘duplicate’ contacts and merge

This did present a bit of a problem.  When I started going through my contacts there were tons of duplicate contacts that weren’t merging.  Also, it imported tons of email addresses that had no information attached.  I went back to Outlook and noted that there were contact lists called ‘suggested contacts’ that had thousands of entries.  I deleted all my contacts in Google Contacts and re-exported the Outlook contacts ONLY from my personal contact list and imported them into Google and, voilà, (NOT ‘Walla’ as some of our American friends say – sorry that’s a pet peeve of mine) only my clean contact list was imported.

Signatures.  Outlook allows you to have a main or ‘full’ signature and an alternate for replies and forwards.  As far as I can tell, Google mail doesn’t have this functionality.  If anyone has found a solution to this, please let me know.

Google Apps for Business Support

One word – AWESOME!!

• They answered the phone, first of all, which seems rare these days
• I did not encounter any language barriers
• They answered all my questions
• They made suggestions based on my application even when I didn’t ask something
• They followed up by email with instructions.