Setting up your own Domain Email

You have just registered your business domain name. You have assigned the task of creating your business website to a trusted wed designer friend and he has promised to have it ready within a week.

You current email is yourname@gmail.com. You like it. It is very personal and it says who you are. However you have this nagging feeling that is does not give your business the right image. It makes your business appear small and lacking in resources. You want your own domain email. You want your email to be yourname@yourbusiness.com. It addition you want to give your staff their own their.names@yourbusiness.com email.

How do you do it?

Email service is normally provided when you sign up for hosting with any respectable full service hosting provider. Sometimes it is not turned on and you have to turn it on via the control panel.

Once email service is switched on, you can create new emails by keying in the email name and password. For example, john@yourbusiness.com with login password "xxx" and jane@yourbusiness.com with login password "yyy". The email service may have also create some default email address for you for example postmaster@yourbusiness.com

In the process of setting up email addresses, you will come across some terms such as pop, imap, alias, forwarding etc which may be unfamiliar to you. Understanding what they are will help make the domain email setup process much easier.

What are POP and IMAP?

They are two of the most widely used Internet standard protocol for email retrieval. All modern e-mail clients and mail servers support both protocols as a means of transferring e-mail messages from a server.

When using POP, a client typically connects to the e-mail server for only as it takes to download new messages. The POP protocol requires only one client to connect to a particular mailbox. When using IMAP4, clients can stay connected as long as the user interface is active and download message content on demand. For users with many or large messages, this IMAP4 usage pattern can result in faster response times. The IMAP protocol specifically allows simultaneous access by multiple clients and provides mechanisms for clients to detect changes made to the mailbox by other, concurrently connected, clients.

What is a Catch All Email?

The catch all email is usually offered as an option. When activated it allow that mailbox to catch all email messages sent to non-existing addresses on that domain. For example, if you set up your mailbox catchall@yourbusiness.com to be a catch-all email, then any email sent to any mailbox that has not been created for this domain, e.g. wrongemail@yourbusiness.com will be forwarded to catchall@yourbusiness.com. The main advantage of setting up a catch all email address is it helps to minimize lost email messages due to wrongly spelt recipient email addresses.

What is the difference between Mail Forwarding and Mail Alias?

On the surface it looks very much the same but there is a big difference between mail forwarding and mail alias.

An email address is essentially an account (mailbox) located on an email server. It stores incoming emails and the user can retrieve them at their convenience. In order to receive emails you must login with your logon name on the mail server of that account (mailbox). It is like your postal mail address: if you wish to receive mail, you must supply a mail address.

Email forwarding refers to re-sending received messages from one email account to another either within the same domain or to another domain. For example a message sent (usually automatically) from yourname@yourbusiness.com to john@yourbusiness.com or to someonename@gmail.com.

Email forwarding can redirect or resend mail from one address to one or several other addresses. Conversely, messages can be resent or forwarded from several different addresses to a single email address.

An email alias looks like an email address. However it is not an email address. It is simply a name defined in the mail server to represent a real email address. For example you have a real email address called yourname@yourbusiness.com. You can create as many aliases as you wish for example sales@yourbusiness.com, support@yourbusiness.com etc and associate them with your email address.

When someone sends you an email to the alias name (sales@yourbusiness.com), the mail server of that domain name will forward the email message to the real address (yourname@yourbusiness.com). If you wish to check if you have new mail at sales@yourbusiness.com, you will have to check your email account yourname@yourbusiness.com.

You can use both the alias and the real email address to send emails, but the replies will always be received at your real account.

What is an Email Auto-responder?

An auto-responder is a computer program that automatically answers e-mail sent to it. They can be very simple or quite complex. Specialized commercial auto-responders are often used as e-mail marketing tools, to immediately provide information to their prospective customers and then follow-up with them at preset time intervals.

However the ones found in typical mail servers are quite simple. Most will just send a pre-written message to anyone who sends an email message to you.


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