Greg Falken

For many years, I’ve shown clients how they can use a personal Gmail account to manage sending and receiving email from their own domains. Using Gmail’s “send as” and “check mail from other accounts” features allowed them to access mailboxes included in their web hosting accounts.

Sadly, starting in January 2027, Gmail will discontinue these two features. If you manage a domain email address through a personal Gmail account (not Google Workspace), this affects you. If your business email already lives somewhere other than Gmail, congratulations, you can stop reading here.

I recently set out to answer a question that had been nagging at me: if an AI agent showed up at Webdancers’ front door, could it actually get anything done? Not “can it read the page” – I know it can do that. But could it look up what we offer, understand whether we’re a good fit for a project, and hand off a qualified inquiry? I didn’t know, and the only way to find out was to build the thing and see.

What Is Agentic AI? As a fairly new buzzword, it’s not well understood, so let’s define our terms. A regular AI chatbot answers questions. An agentic AI (i.e. an AI agent) takes actions on your behalf. It doesn’t just tell you what a form requires, it fills it out; it doesn’t just summarize a company’s services, it can go look them up on the company’s own systems and then act on what it finds. “Agentic” means the AI has access to tools it can actually use, not just talk about. That distinction turns out to matter a lot, as I discovered.

I recently completed a project I had been putting off for years: moving my business email off Google. Not because of a single dramatic issue, but because enough small reasons had accumulated that I finally couldn’t ignore them anymore.

This is the backstory of what pushed me to make the move, how I chose where to land, and a few things I learned along the way.

It started small, as most projects do. I wanted to know if my website would get mentioned in AI chatbots as an authoritative source for the services I offer. I tried a few online “score my site” tools and while they weren’t necessarily bad (those that worked), they didn’t address the question in the way I would have liked.

I wanted a tool that would explain what was needed and why, in language that anyone could understand. Since AI is pretty good at summarizing things when given the proper instructions, I decided to build something that other website owners would find useful. And full disclosure, if they liked it, they might want to hire me to do it for them.