Well after hearing from Darren that he was switching in full to using Google for business email I decided to investigate myself. Google have a fantastic offer for small businesses; up to 25 mail accounts with a 6Gb limit ‘each’ which runs through your own domain.

It’s all pretty easy to set up though if you have a lot of existing email to import (how about 3Gb) then it can be quite painful!

I start shifting email across a few days back, starting with folders containing email to prospects then working my way slowly through my client folders, which are organised by client and job number. This is where I hit a big snag. Google Mail does not support folders (or labels as they call them) which have names that are longer than 40 characters. So as much as I would love to use Google for Mail because I might have a folder called ‘Clients’ with a sub folder called ‘John Smith Tractors’ and a folder inside that called ‘J123 – Website Development’ I am well and truly stuck.

Nothing I can do about it unless I want to spend hours renaming all my folders, shortening the names or manually re-labeling all the email to use multiple labels once inside Google Mail.

If only there was a script that turned ‘folders with sub folders’ into ‘multiple labels’ then I would be saved.