Dave Riley » google

Google mail and your own domains

Dave Riley — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:45:44 +0000

Google mail is a great way to run multiple domain addresses as it can reply from the address it was sent too, try that in Outlook!

One annoying problem for me is sometimes it “has difficulty” sending the email from your domain, maybe a timeout on the server or some other network issue. When this occurs Google will “kindly” forward your email using your gmail account instead. Now this sounds reasonable but it’s annoying if you have your own business and you are effectively replying to customers with a free gmail account, that looks so unprofessional.

gmail sometimes sends my domains mail from it's own address

This is a little suspicious as Google doesn’t have an equivalent of the old hotmail footer advertising that this person uses free email and you can get yours here link; but effectively this is a gmail advert through the backdoor. People will see you are using gmail and therefore endorse it. But worse than that it is confusing for the recipients as it wouldn’t be the same email they sent to originally.

It happened to me so many times in July that I was about to start using my own webmail service and drop gmail then while changing the settings on one of my accounts I spotted a new setting, goto “settings” (top right of menu on gmail page) then click on “Accounts and Import” then in the “Send mail as:” section “edit info” on your domain click next and you will see something like:

you can now use your own SMTP server

Once you put in your SMTP servers settings gmail will only send through this and you shouldn’t see the dreaded free email address again. Since changing this I haven’t had the problem, if you do have any issues with it let me know.

Cheers

Dave

New google is available for testing by developers

Dave Riley — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:57:53 +0000

Google has announced on the official webmaster central blog that the next version of Google search is available for developer testing. It looks the same but there have been radical changes to the underlying algorithms this should make the results more relevant and better quality.

You can find the new search engine at:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

At first glance,it’s downgraded my site not too happy with that… Bing anyone?

Have you taken the blind search test?

Dave Riley — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:46:37 +0000

You might think that you prefer Google,but what would you choose if you didn’t know what search engine you are using and just had to choose based on the results?

Now you can find out at http://blindsearch.fejus.com if you do try it please leave a comment with what you’re results are I’d love to know.

Finally we can have answers…