I currently use the free google apps service for my mail, contacts and calendar and have it linked in to my own domain. I also use Google docs, calc etc for creating and storing of documents.

Due to the recent change Google have made to the free Google apps service I’m looking for a new home and I wonder if Zoho might be suitable. I do have some questions though that I hope some of you can help me with.

I’ve setup a free individual zoho account to test it out with the hope I can move my domain into the free 3 person business account.

1.       When I signed up to the individual free Zoho account it asked for  a second email account so I typed in an old gmail that I had. Why does Zoho need this second account? When I login to zoho mail I see my zoho email address at the top, but when I change over to writer and open a document for instance, I see my gmail address in the top right hand corner. I would have thought I’d never see my gmail address and everything would be going through the zoho address!

2.       Does the free service support exchange push?

3.       How much mail space do I get with the free service? I think it’s 5GB per person, is this correct?

4.       How much “document” space do I get to store my documents, spreadsheets etc?

5.       Is there a daily limit to how much data I can transfer? I didn’t see this mentioned anywhere when I was looking at the differences between the different plans, lite, standard 10 and standard 15, but I’ve seen people mention in the forums that their accounts have been locked because of too much use, which is a bit worrying.

6.       Are the limits I mentioned above the same for the free individual account and the free business account?

7.       Could anyone familiar with gmail tell me what the main advantages, disadvantages zoho mail has when compared to gmail? What sort of things I’m I likely to miss if anything? I’ve already discovered that the profile pictures I have setup for my contacts don’t appear when pushed down to my iphone and also don’t appear in mail when emailing. In gmail they appear in both locations.

8.       How easy is it to move my existing email, contacts and calendar information across into zoho?

Finally if there is a more suitable forum where I should post this please let me know.

Many thanks