If you’re an active user of Google’s Gmail webmail service, the chances are that you noticed its disappearance for a few hours this morning – and if you’re not, it says a lot for the popularity of the service that the downtime made the BBC!

Hunting around online revealed that earlier today social networks were alive and chirruping with ‘OMG, Gmail’s vanished! How am I going to get my emails?’ messages, with some moments of minor panic from small business owners and people who work from home that they may be missing out on important business emails.

Much as I like Gmail – it’s flexible, powerful and intuitive to use and as long as you’ve a web connection you can pick it up wherever you happen to be – I was rather shocked that people would use it for business purposes. Surely a more professional appearance would be presented with an email address that tied in to a business domain name? That’s why our email address is blog@daily.co.uk and not somethingorother @gmail.com, after all.

Having an email service with your own domain doesn’t cost much and should be well worth your while for the professionalism it will project to your potential customers, and if you’ve more than one staff member you’ll be able to forward mail sent to specific email addresses to specific people so that you can direct customer enquiries to the appropriate people. Plus, you don’t lose those ‘pick it up anywhere’ benefits that come with Gmail – you can still access your emails via our webmail service.

Now, I grant you, it doesn’t have the impressive multi-coloured customisable labelling that comes with Gmail, but it gets my vote for presenting a professional appearance to your customers without sacrificing accessibility.