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How a small business owner can reduce the cost of Google Apps

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Experience Level: Beginner
5:19
Joe Winograd
50+ years in computers
Development•Sales
CIO•Document Imaging
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In this Experts Exchange video Micro Tutorial, I'm going to show how small business owners who use Google Apps can save money by setting up what is called a catch-all email address in their Gmail accounts. By using the catch-all feature, small business owners can support popular inbound email addresses, such as info@MySmallCompany.com, sales@MySmallCompany.com, support@MySmallCompany.com, etc., without having to pay the Google Apps fee for those "users". If the volume of such emails in your small business is reasonable, then all of them can be directed to another Gmail account on your domain. In the best case scenario, a one-person company can do fine with just a single Google Account user, saving the small business owner hundreds of dollars per year.

Video Steps

1. Sign into your Google Admin Console


Visit this link:

https://admin.google.com/AdminHome

Choose your Google Account and sign in with your password.

Step1

2. Bring up the Apps Settings


Click Apps.

Step2

3. Bring up the Google Apps Settings


Click Google Apps.

Step3

4. Bring up the Gmail Settings


Click Gmail.

Step4

5. Bring up the Gmail User Settings


Click User settings.

Step5

6. Enter the catch-all address


Scroll down until you find a section in the Gmail User Settings called Routing.

Enter the address of a real Gmail user in your account. This is where messages sent to unknown user accounts will be delivered.

Step6

7. Save the change to the catch-all setting


Click SAVE.

Step7
That's it! I hope you just saved yourself some money in Google Apps fees. Better in your pocket than Google's!

If you find this video to be helpful, please click the thumbs-up icon below. Thank you for watching!
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Author:Joe Winograd
2 Comments
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Comment

by:Allen Falcon
The downside of this approach is that any email sent to the domain, legitimate or not will be routed to the one user, which greatly increases the chances of spam and phishing attacks getting through.  It also provides a "legitimate" return address for spammers that use spoofing.

Other options are:
Setup specific nicknames for the user, such as info@, sales@, service@, help@ etc. This can be done from the User admin section, as noted in the video, by adding alias addresses.
Use the Groups feature to setup a "distribution list" for info@, sales@, etc to forward to the user

The advantage of these options is that you can also configure to user so that he/she can reply using the nickname/group name.  So, the user can reply as info@, sales@ etc OR their personal address.
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Author Comment

by:Joe Winograd
Hi Allen,
Yes, those are downsides of the approach, as stated in Google's caveat shown in Step #6 above and why I took the time to read the caveat in full during the video. Thanks very much for providing your thoughts on other options — those are interesting ideas! I've used aliases/nicknames and groups/distribution lists with other email providers/client software, but not with Gmail. I'll check it out — appreciate the tip! Regards, Joe
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