In a small business environment, email is absolutely the single most important thing of communicating with customers. So at the early stage of our IT infrastructure build-out, a reliable and also versatile email server is on everybody's top list. Our missionary search ended back then with an enterprise email solution that does exactly what we want it to do and even more. But we also ended up with two servers, one with a little more green foot print and the other, a power hog.

The setup of email server would require a hierarchy that closely mimic a large corporate setting which in turn require multiple server buildup to avoid conflict and achieve redundancy. The email server provided a web-based access page that everyone can use to check their email, be it at home or out to travel. To keep the server running so we can receive email 24/7, a separate UPS is also added to the duo and our email backed up tens of time in a day to prevent loss. With each server running single power supply, it's comsumption of electricity reached 300Watts/day. This setup worked very well in-house and everyone didn't seem to mind the noise and the bill. 

In 2004, Google announced the Gmail amid a flurry of rumors. Its powerful search function and mail capacity of gigs attract attentions, and this time from small businesses. What Gmail does for the small business is not unprecendent. Many webhosts before Gmail also offered some sorts of free web email system that were all so cumbersome to read and archive. Besides, even using the email client like Outlook via pop3 will worsen many problems if the mails were read from different access points. Often times, multiple mails are stored inside the Outlook or important emails deleted because of a different client setting. 

With IMAP and its upper hand in search, the emergence of Gmail has embarked a whole new territory for small business to offload their mail server onto Google's cloud computing, not only save time and money but conserving energy. Imagine the server that its sole task is to receive email is no longer needed and keeping email running and well backed up are pushed to Google, small business could efficiently manage their business using emails as the tool.

With its latest release of Google Apps, small business can even create their very own email identity complete with email boxes and alias like info, service etc. And can even use it to manage multiple email boxes that are not in the domain of gmail.