Building your own business is not as simple as a piece of cake. It requires a lot of planning and decision making, plus the efforts of getting ready for issues, problems and challenges coming your way soon. Today's blog is all about my preferences in choosing the business email for my brother.

My brother got himself a business license late last month and it was his first solo business. He has a previous one in cooperation with his captain friends, yes that's a ship captain.

Our eldest brother is a graduate of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineer and he had been to different companies working as a surveyor. Currently, he is employed in a Panamanian owned company. He had filed his resignation few months ago but is still waiting for the new employee to arrive in Dubai, United Arab Emirates before he can leave the company. But although he is still employed, he is also working for his new business.

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Since he has clients now, the email he was using is through a free email service. And he dislike the fact that he is not showcasing his brand in the email so he had consulted myself and my husband for the best business email service. I have been in the corporate world too for quite some time and there are couple of email services we have been using so today, I am going to show case some of the email services I have been using and what I prefer for business.

Email Services

The likes of Gmail and Yahoo offer free email service. Most of us here perhaps owns one or two email accounts with these sites and everyone is also familiar with it because they are two of the top free email services available out there.

Factors in selecting an email hosting service includes user friendliness, security, compatibility and storage.

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• User Friendliness •

We need an email host which we can use at ease, the graphics and interface looks easy to comprehend and navigate and that which we can find items efficiently. Most email services now provides this and that's a good news though however, there are still users who are not very much confident in using these for certain reasons.

It is then important that you have tested and checked for yourself how the service works.

• Security • 

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Email hacking is an issue which costs a lot to a business therefore having a secured email service is important to any entrepreneur. Perhaps this is the top thing to consider when selecting an email service.

You don't want to have your information shared with people outside the email network. It is therefore important that the email hosting service is compliant to the security certifications and certain regulations.

With that, kindly try to check this Querlo chatbot about security breaches of other email service:

• Compatibility •

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This generation has so much relied to portability as such mobile devices and tablets which can be brought with the entrepreneur is the trend. Email services as well has to comply with this demand.

Therefore it is important for an email service to be compatible with multiple mobile device platforms such as iOS, Android and etc. Aside from that, setting up the email account shouldn't be hard for the user to do so on their mobile apps.

• Storage •

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This is another important thing to consider upon because emails are as important as the business and not all email providers give a good amount of storage on their server. For free email services, they have a limited amount of GB storage on the cloud.

Although this is the same as business emails, there are way way more options for the storage size, there are some which provides 30 GB, 50 GB and even unlimited storage! The option of course depends on the amount a business can afford for their premium account.

My Preferred Business Email Host

Now back to the selection of business service, I had come along three options which I will be explaining to you later on this blog. These services of course may not be your preferred ones but these are what I have thought would be best for my brother's new business and because he isn't "techy" enough with these stuffs, he sought for our advise and even asked us to set it up for him.

With that, here are three of the options I have selected and how I ended up with sticking to one.

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1. Google's G Suite

Who doesn't know Google? Everyone does and it is a popular email host too as it owns Gmail as one of its services. Aside from having a free gmail account, one can also subscribe to G Suite.

G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work and Google Apps for Your Domain) is a brand of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed by Google, launched on August 28, 2006. G Suite comprises Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Google+ for communication; Drive for storage; Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Sites for collaboration; and, depending on the plan, an Admin panel and Vault for managing users and the services. It also includes the digital interactive whiteboard Jamboard.

Information reference: wikipedia.org

Video credits: Profound Cloud via YouTube.com

As you can see, Google G Suite handles a lot of applications useful for a business and thus it was the first option I want to establish my brother's business with. I recommended it to him but unfortunately, he doesn't have a domain when he tried setting up his company email.

Worse case, he bought a domain from Google itself and ended up unable to verify the domain to be used for the email service. It cost him around AED 45 or Php 500+ for the annual domain. It was too late for us to get that set up. Unfortunately, the domain can't be verified because Google don't have the domain starter activated for UAE. For some very unfriendly reasons, we can't get it to be verified.

It took 48 hours before I gave up on it and can't give another hour for that although we had contacted the support, there was still no solution provided so we have to give up.

2. Godaddy's Email Service

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GoDaddy Inc. is an American publicly traded Internet domain registrar and web hosting company. As of May 2017, GoDaddy has served approximately 17 million customers and had over 6000 employees worldwide. The company is known for its advertising.

Information reference: wikipedia.org

Since we can't work on the domain bought by my brother from Google, we have to create a new one and just forget about the first. James and I are familiar with Godaddy and it has an email service too, one which is free together with their hosting service with free domain too but with a limited storage of only 100 MB. I know it is very limited and my brother had complained about that before with the previous cooperation so we have to ditched the hosting part and just stick with the Domain plus the Email.

Bought the domain for Php 799 for two years, they were on sale though as the regular price for annual subscription is around Php 750. Buying the domain for two years would be a wise decision and so we did however, the email service they are offering are quite expensive. A price of 2.99$ for the entry level business email with 5 GB storage per month but costs 4.99$ on renewal. However this is though Outlook web application so we then consider going to Outlook itself rather than Godaddy.

3. Microsoft Outlook Exchange Online

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This email service is what we use in our company and thus, I am very familiar with how to use and navigate although the other two are also very easy to use.

Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft Office suite. Although often used mainly as an email application, it also includes a calendar, task manager, contact manager, note taking, journal, and web browsing.

Information reference: wikipedia.org

Checking on the pricing, it seems we have a good deal with their Exchange Online (Plan 1) which costs 4$ per user per month and the premium one costs 12$ but with a free trial.

Video credits: Official Channel of Microsoft Outlook via YouTube.com

I have to give the free trial a try of course so I can check if the set up is smooth compared to Google. Fortunately, it seems the set up didn't give me any issues because Outlook is a partner of Godaddy, setting the DNS and other stuffs for the personalized email domain didn't take that long. In fact, they did it for me! So after about three minutes, I was done with my brother's business email.

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So then the battle was finished and I had to stick with Outlook. It's web email service is definitely fine although the Plan 1 doesn't come with the mobile app options, that is still fine as it supports web on mobile.

Now I have to make sure that once the free trial of 30 days ends, we get the Plan 1 right away.

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There you go, now this blog should give you insights in case you are planning to get yourself a personalized business email with your business domain in it.

Best regards,
Jean Beltran-Figues
♥ blogging since 2010 ♥
♥ photography enthusiast ♥
♥ a wife of a programmer/gardener/gamefowl breeder ♥
♥ we travel and promote our beloved country, the Philippines ♥