Five million businesses use Google Apps and an estimated 425 million individuals actively use Gmail, a free email service. We at IRISS use Google Apps for our email, calendar and other services. For a business Google Apps is very cost effective (about £33 per person per year) and also keeps us pretty much free of spam email. In short, it’s a respected and reliable service provider.
So we were intrigued when a colleague at IRISS found that her emails to a local authority in the north of Scotland were not reaching their intended recipients because the council, apparently, classes email from Google email accounts as spam and bins them. Employees can ask to have Gmail unblocked, but they’d have to know they hadn’t received an email.
It seems an odd policy which, apart from being a rather blunt method of filtering out spam, must add to internal administration costs as well as frustrating those clients and customers who number amongst Google’s millions of users: their communications will treated a spam and binned. It’s worth reflecting that, far form seeing Google mail as a threat, some local authorities, as noted in a previous blog post, themselves use Google Apps because it saves money and makes life easier for everyone. Something Christie would surely applaud.