For those of you with a Microsoft Exchange Server in your office, you’ll want/need a ‘spam filter’. In fact, if you have MS Exchange Server for your email system, odds are you have a spam filter, which is either software you install on your Exchange Server, an ‘appliance’ you install in your office or a service. We used Postini anti-spam filter service for many years but recently switched (or more correctly ‘switched back’) to Spam Soap – we used Spam Soap before we used Postini.

Spam Soap has a great feature called ’email continuity’, which allows a user to send/receive email from the Spam Soap website when their Exchange Server is unavailable for whatever reason. You can see how helpful that can be !

Posted by Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management, Google Apps

Google Apps started with the simple idea that Gmail could help businesses and schools work better together without the hassles of managing software and servers. As we grew from a handful of customers to a few hundred, we expanded to offer a premium business version of Google Apps. Fast forward to today and Google Apps is used by millions of businesses. We’ve also added versions for governments, universities and schools.

When we launched the premium business version we kept our free, basic version as well. Both businesses and individuals signed up for this version, but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn’t quite right for either group. Businesses quickly outgrow the basic version and want things like 24/7 customer support and larger inboxes. Similarly, consumers often have to wait to get new features while we make them business-ready.

With this in mind, we’ve decided to make things very straightforward. Starting today for all new customers:
Individuals wishing to use Google’s web apps like Gmail and Google Drive should create a free personal Google Account, which provides a seamless experience across all of our web services on any device.
For Businesses, instead of two versions, there will be one. Companies of all sizes will sign up for our premium version, Google Apps for Business, which includes 24/7 phone support for any issue, a 25GB inbox, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee with no scheduled downtime. Pricing is still $50 per user, per year.

Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version. And as before, Google Apps for Education will be available as a free service for schools and universities. Also, as the first cloud productivity suite with FISMA certification, we’ll continue to offer Google Apps for Government for $50 per user, per year.

With focus we’ll be able to do even more for our business customers. We’re excited about the opportunity to push Google Apps further so our customers can do what matters most to them–whether that’s scooping ice cream, changing the face of healthcare or contributing to lifelong learning.

Cons

• Can’t easily edit ‘nicknames’ list, however you can edit contacts, which is where nicknames come from
• Can’t copy and paste a picture and text simultaneously
• Conversation view is different than Outlook; can be disabled
• Can’t edit an email when forwarding
• Can’t resend a sent email
• 25 mb attachment limit; but you can use Google Docs
• Can’t expand distribution group
• Can’t send word docs to email without configuring outlook

Pros

• Google search feature used to search gmail emails
• Same gmail interface regardless of where we are
• No need to maintain Exchange Server
• Filters, labels, + feature
• Google Drive

Or you can use Outlook with gmail/google and this list becomes N/A