E-mail questions

Arrath

Years ago, in the dark ages of the internet, my father paid for a dial-up connection, as many did in those days. He made use of the e-mail account provided with that service for his small business. He still does, its the e-mail on the business cards hes been handing out for years and years, what is listed for his business in industry directories, etc.

This means that for all these years after he moved on to better and faster internet services, from other providers, he has continued to shell out for this dial up, purely for the e-mail. This seems rather wasteful, considering you can get a nice gmail account for free.

The account is an atteleportdotcom address, a small ISP that was bought out years ago by Earthlink. He uses Outlook to check his emails. I'm well versed in backing up and exporting all the archived emails and the address book from Outlook, so my question is could I set him up a gmail account and import all that stuff, and then set it up so that emails to that old address are forwarded to the new, free one, without paying for the old one?

Or would it be a longer, more painful change over with new business cards, updated directories, mass mailings to his address book informing them of the change, etc?

matt has a problem

Just wait until he runs out of business cards and needs them reprinted, and do the switch then. It wouldn't be hard to mass-mail all his old contacts from the new Gmail account, and set up forwarding on the old account to forward anything that arrives before you stop paying for it and it's shut down.

MushroomStick

Everything matthasaproblem said except for waiting until he runs out of the old business cards. You don't want to hand people outdated info. Get new business cards now, they're cheap.

Daenris

Arrath wrote: »

could I set him up a gmail account and import all that stuff, and then set it up so that emails to that old address are forwarded to the new, free one, without paying for the old one?

No. If you no longer pay for the old address you won't retain access to it and will then not be able to set up any kind of mail forwarding for that address.

I'd suggest what MushroomStick/matthasaproblem said. Just forward the mail now, update his business cards to the gmail address, and continue paying for the old email for 3-6 months. Send a message about updating his email to all current customers, and make sure he uses the gmail for all communication to current/new customers so that they have the new address. After a few months, the bulk of customers should be using the updated address and you can cancel the old account.

AngelHedgie

Since he owns his own business, you should look at going the extra mile and setting up a Google Apps account using a domain name based on his business. Yes, it will cost money. But it looks a LOT more polished when you have on your business card an email address with a domain that is clearly owned by the company.

Tomanta

AngelHedgie wrote: »

Since he owns his own business, you should look at going the extra mile and setting up a Google Apps account using a domain name based on his business. Yes, it will cost money. But it looks a LOT more polished when you have on your business card an email address with a domain that is clearly owned by the company.

This. Domains are extremely cheap and look a lot more professional. Also, as my own general rule, don't host mail with your ISP.

A couple of reasons. Owning your domain name means you get to keep your address, wherever it goes (and can set up a webpage if you choose to do so). Not hosting with your ISP saves headaches if you change providers or your provider changes on you - gmail/godaddy/etc isn't likely to go anywhere.