We love Google Apps, and think that if your business isn’t using it you’re probably:
- Spending too much money
- Wasting too much time
- Receiving inferior service
- Swearing at your computer too much
Having said that: nothing’s perfect. We’ve found a few Google Apps annoyances. Some are personal; some are terrible oversights. But there’s usually a way to work around it. Here are some problems (and fixes) we’ve found in the past few months.
Threaded Conversation
To some it’s one of Gmail’s best features: the threaded conversation. If multiple emails are part of the same conversation, they are presented as such in order.
Understandably, some people aren’t able to let go of 15 years of email convention. If you’re in the crowd, worry not; you can quickly and easily disable this feature in Gmail’s settings. Just change this option:
Yep, that’s all it takes.
Calendar not showing up on iPhone
So you’ve added your new Google Apps account to your iPhone, but are dismayed to only see a single calendar show up? That’s a drag.
Lucky for you, though, this is really easy to fix. Just click here and you can choose which calendars show up on your iPhone. Beautiful.
Legitimate Email Marked As Spam
We hate spam email, but hate it more when real email ends up in the spam folder. While it’s rare for this to happen, we have seen it with Google Apps on a couple of occasions.
There are two main fixes for this. The first: mark all real emails in the spam folder as “not spam.” This will teach Gmail which emails you want to keep.
If this doesn’t work, add the email addresses of any messages sent to spam to your contact list. This should ensure they make it to your inbox.
If even that doesn’t work, you can set up a filter that specifically sends messages from a given email directly to your inbox. Read more here.
Conclusion
Nothing’s perfect; Google Apps is close. We were able to solve these problems, and can probably solve yours as well. Feel free to list them in the comments below; we’ll do what we can to respond.