"Getting the most out of your mail account"
by Candice Humbley
Email is the lifeline of any online business, offering a cost effective method of communication over the Internet. If you have an online presence and/or business it is essential that you have your own mail server - a mail server is a site on the web where you can have your own personal mail box. With a mail server you can send and receive mail to just about anyone on the Internet. However there is a lot more to having a mail account then just sending and receiving mail, such as auto-responders, forwarders, aliases, mailing lists and catch all mailboxes.
Aliases
Make sure that you can set up as many aliases as you like with your ISP. An alias is another name for an email address or a number of addresses. Many ISP allow you to have multiple aliases such as sales@yourdomain.com and support@yourdomain.com.
Auto-responders
An auto-responder is an automatically generated email message that provides static information to the recipient. For example, if an email is sent to one of your email addresses an email will be sent automatically to the sender of the email.
Forwarders
Make sure you check with your ISP that you can set up forwarders. Forwarding is where different aliases can be forwarded to one or more email addresses. For example, if you have the email address info@yourdomain.com, you can set up a forwarder so that all emails sent to info@yourdomain.com are forwarded to your other email address sales@yourdomain.com.
Catch-all
A catch-all mailbox basically catches all emails with typos, incorrect names etc, but the email has the domain name in the email address spelt correctly (e.g. typo@yourdomain.com). For example, you can set up an alias such as mailmanager@yourdomain.com and all emails with typos are redirected to this mailbox.
Mailing Lists
A mailing list is a system for distributing email messages to many people at once. Mailing lists are a good tool to use if you have a brochure, catalog or newsletter and you want to distribute to lots of people. ISP should either have some sort of Mailing list program installed or have a mailing list included on their mail server.
Written By Candice Humbley
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