You’ve most certainly experienced one of these scenarios:
- You are away from the office but you need to find an attachment or a piece of information from an email.
- Your remote connection to your office computer is not working and you need to reply back to a client.
- Your Exchange server is down and your business depends on email for basic operation.
- Your hard drive crashed and you didn’t backup your Outlook file.
We’ve all been there. You’ve made that long trip to the office in the middle of the night. You’ve wasted time looking at the clock when you could have been replying to time-sensitive emails. You’ve lost all of your emails since the last time you made a backup (which, unfortunately, is often never).
I have a free and pain-free solution. Gmail can be used as a handy free email backup. It’s very easy to do. Create your Gmail account (try to stick with something professional if you’ll be using it as a backup for work emails). If you’re managing your own email accounts, setup a forwarder that will send a copy of all emails you receive to Gmail. If you don’t have this access or knowledge, contact your IT gal or guy and ask if they can do it for you. Once you get it going, you can then have access to your email anywhere you go. You can check email on your web-enabled phone. You can check it from home. You can reply to messages when you’re not at your desk.
And…most importantly: You’ve got a free backup of your email in the event that disaster does strike!
