Well in a previous post i described how i am the IT Manager at this company and i am in charge of everything computer wise and this company still has DSL and they want me to get them more up to date and upgrade, like upgrading almost everything.
So lets jump into the second main big question i have. So they have a personal email server with their website and i have no idea who hosts it. Some bull like JalapeƱototheleft and its irritating because i cant for the life of me figure out the hosts and my boss isnt the brightest so he doesnt know. But what i want to do is sign up for like googles business and have like all emails go through googles servers instead of our personal email server now because our spam filter is terrible and my boss and co-workers get soo much spam in their inboxes about orders that arent real and like half of china is in their Blocked contact list. I just want to make life simple for them. How they have to use Outlook or really complicated ways of doing things is horrible. I want to make things better so they could just pull up googles gmail login page and just type in a private email instead of @gmail.com it would be something like @kalpack.com
So if anyone wants to give me some kind of tips if signing up for the google thing to get away from our private email servers would be better and/or cost effective?
Yes i have access to everything. Well not everything. I have access to the website directory and main server but i dont have access to the dns settings with the domain name. I would say you are thinking about the google business stuff. Are they any good for what im trying to do?
It could work for what you want. However any email service will require access to your domain DNS settings as you'll have to change the MX records to point email to the right provider. Unless you changed domains but that makes other problems.
You might need to look and see if there's a requirement to move the current mail everyone has to a new provider of if you can start afresh.. I think people are funny about mail.
Email is probably one of the most difficult things to support its just on big shitstorm. I only recommend Google For Business for email. At 5$ a user it seems a lot but man is it so freaking nice. If someone wants an email client put them on thunderbird and you're good to go.
You will need DNS settings to move to google apps though.
It is also possible to upload all of the old emails to new google apps emails. It takes a while but I used to do it all of the time for my old job. I transferred 100+ emails accounts from different clients to gapps because we phased out our POP3 server. Just google something like "transfer emails to google for business email" or something like that and you should be able to find the program.
Also if they have some weird registar for their domain try to transfer them to someone like namecheap.com, gandi.net, or google domains you'll thank me later. Having complete control over your DNS is SUPER necessary always. Then you can get whatever hosting package you want.
When you say you have access to the web directory and main server what does that mean? What I understand from that is that you have FTP access and cpanel access, is that right? If you don't have access to the actual account and you don't know that host specific you can do like reverse DNS or whois on the domain. http://whois.domaintools.com/ that will at least tell you the registrar name and usually that also means they're hosting with that company too.
I say move them over to Office365 and export the mailboxes individually or if support find a migration tool, theirs a couple out there that we use.. can you explain your current email server? how many users? budget if possible?