You may have heard of it under different names in the last years: Google Apps for Work, Google apps, Gmail for business or even Gmail for your domain.

What is Google G Suite? What is it for?

Google G Suite is one of the professional services that Google offers to small and medium businesses. And it includes several of its most outstanding products: Gmail, Drive, Hangouts, Docs or Sheets, among others.

The difference with Gmail is that G Suite includes everything under a domain customized by the client; so, instead of having your mail @ gmail.com, with G Suite you can have your Google mail with your domain @ businessname.com. All together with the simplicity and security that Google brings.

Why use Google G Suite mail for your project?

It is possible that you already have a mail contracted from another provider, or even that your current hosting service provides it for you. Even so, I invite you to continue reading about G Suite.

We ourselves, at Awesome Web Designs, used to use the mail account offered from our hosting service. However, we decided to stop doing it and work with G Suite. Why? Well, here are my three biggest advantages of having your email with Google from my own point of view:

• A safe and reliable mail service: Since I met the G Suite service, I believe that the words I have used the most to define it are reliability and security.
• More applications than a simple email manager: I always focus on the advantages of having Google mail with your own custom domain. But the truth is that G Suite gives you more. According to the contracted plan, you will have access to tools such as Google Calendar to synchronize schedules and improve your time management; Hangouts, to make video conferences or Google Drive to store documents in the cloud. In addition, even in the most basic plan, you have 30GB of mail storage (twice as much as in a Gmail account). And if you hire any of the superior plans, the storage becomes unlimited.
• As easy to use as Gmail: Another advantage about G Suite is its simplicity. It is very easy to access your email and log in. You can do it directly from gmail.com or their mobile app. Other email tools I’ve tried, like Webmail, are more complex to configure and less stable.

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The price: How much does Google G Suite cost?

How much does it cost to contract the mail with Google? The Google G Suite program has a price per user, and the amount depends on which of the 3 editions you choose:

1. G Suite Basic ($5 CAD per month)
2. G Suite Business ($10 per month)
3. G Suite Enterprise (price subject to contact with Google).

If I’m honest with you, all the people I know who have purchased G Suite, they work with the Basic account, as we also do at Awesome Web Designs.

G Suite trick: Free and unlimited aliases

If you want to have several email accounts but you can’t afford the price, there is a trick you can try:

G Suite allows you to have unlimited aliases per user for free. What is an alias? Well, it is an alternative name of your email account. For example, if you have an online store, you can have the main email account as info @, but have your name @, orders @ or support @ as alias paying just a single account.

Thus, users will be able to write emails to all those accounts and you would receive them unified in your unique mailbox to info @.

How to register and configure your mail with Google G Suite

I would like to do a small tutorial for you with the steps you must follow to set it up.

Requirements

Before starting the process, you should have the following information at hand.

• An own domain registered in your name. It will be the main domain you will use to set your email accounts.
• Access to the domain management panel (or where the DNS servers are). If you can’t find it, it is best to contact your domain hosting provider and ask them where can you manage your DNS records.
• The credit/debit card: You will need it to pay, although you have 14 days to try the system for free.
• The users you want to create: You need to know which users/accounts you want to register.

Registration process

Once we have everything ready, the next step is to access the G Suite website to start the process.

After pressing the button ‘GET STARTED’, you need to start a process of registration in several steps where Google will ask you about the company, such as:

• No. of employees
• Name and surname
• Your current e-mail (add your current personal email)
• Domain name
• Main account: this account is vital! It is the account with which you will access your management panel and you should never erase it.

Access the account

Once the registration process is completed, Google will ask us to add the credentials of your new account.

Add people to your account

After accessing your account, the next step that Google asks us is to add more people to your G Suite account. If you do not want to add more people to the account, simply check the box at the bottom and continue with the next step.

Verify your domain with Google G Suite

This is another delicate process. Verify your domain so that Google can work as a mail provider.

For this, we will have to access the DNS records of the domain as I mentioned before since we have to make a modification there.

The steps we have followed are:

• Log in to our registrar
• Access the control panel
• Delete the old MX records and add the following values in the domain.
  Note: Some domain hosts use different labels for the name and value fields, and some hosts also require a trailing period at the end of the server name.
• Add a meta tag or a domain host record (TXT or CNAME):

• Once both records are created, we will go to the next step by telling Google that we have finished

If everything goes well, you should find this screen:

Choose your G Suite plan

Now you will have access to your G Suite Admin Console:

After accessing your admin console, please select ‘Billing’ > ‘Actions > ‘Access Billing Account’. There you will have the opportunity to keep you current G Suite Business plan or downgrade it to G Suite Basic:

That’s it, now you have full access to your new G Suite mailbox. As you will see, it works the same way as your old personal Gmail account! 😉

Add, change, or remove a user’s photo

As your organization’s administrator, you can add photos of users to easily recognize the people in your organization. You can do this when you create the new user account or later. You can also change or remove a user’s photo at any time.

Where a user’s photo appears

A user’s photo shows up whenever you view the user in the Admin console, when the user communicates or shares content, and when another user hovers over their name in their inbox, Contacts, or Hangouts Chat list.

Photo requirements

A user’s photo can be a JPG, JPEG, or PNG file of up to 5 MB. Photos are scaled automatically, so they can be any dimensions.

Add, change, or remove a user’s photo

1. In your Google Admin console (admin.google.com), click on ‘Users‘.  In the Users list, find the user. If you need help, see ‘Find a user account‘.
2. Click the user’s name to open their account page.
3. At the top left, click the image to edit it and add a photo.
4. Find the image file you want on your computer and select it

Note: When you change a user’s photo, the photo’s visibility setting might change to Visible only to people I can chat with. Learn more about a photo’s visibility setting.

Let users change their photo and profile information

As a Directory administrator, you control what profile information users can change. If allowed, users can change their name, photo, gender, birthday, or work location.

1. In your Google Admin console (admin.google.com), go to Directory settings. Admin Console > Menu > Directory > Directory Settings
2. Click on Profile editing.
3. To apply the setting to everyone, leave the top organizational unit selected. Otherwise, select a child organizational unit or a configuration group.
4. Check the boxes for the profile information you want to let users change. Click Save.

Setting up G Suite’s spam filters (SPF, DKIM and DMARC )

A spam filter is a program that is used to detect unsolicited and unwanted emails and prevent them from getting to your client’s inbox. Like other types of filtering programs, a spam filter looks for certain criteria to base its judgments. To set your spam filters properly, read our article How to Avoid Spam Filters When Sending Emails?