I love supporting my clients who need help with Google Apps not working … because it rarely happens.

Fresh and alive support from a real live human when you're deep in the forest of email support.

Fresh and alive support from a real live human when you’re deep in the forest of email support.

Two email support issues today I was dealing with and my answer to both was more or less, “Gee, I’m not sure what to do and I can’t figure out why it’s not working. Try calling your email host.”

SMTP, POP, MX records, port numbers, Outlook, Mac Mail, Androids, iPhones, syncing, forwarding, catch-all, need I go on? Do you get this stuff? Do you care? Of course not. You just want to read (and occasionally reply to) your email. You want it to work, you want it to be reliable.

It’s why I recommend to all my clients to use email hosted by Google Apps for Work. That’s it. No second choices, no other options, that’s what you should use.

If you’d like to learn more how to set up [email protected] for Google Apps, I’ve written up a popular post about it. I can tell you how to set it up using your Outlook (or other standard email client) and then Set It and Forget It. The settings don’t change, you don’t need to update them later, you don’t need to change them when you’re traveling. It works on your laptop, your desktop, your Mac, your PC, syncs with your phone, your tablet and maybe even your watch (we’ll soon see … ).

I love Google Apps for Work support because they are there for you 24/7 … so I don’t have to be.

Here are a few email hosts that I’ve had to support for clients, but, ahem, in reality there’s not much I can do because I usually can’t figure out even how I could help:

  • Verio
  • AT&T
  • Yahoo

Crickets

Here’s the sound of my phone line while waiting for my clients to call with trouble with their Google Apps for Work email issues.