Getting the most out of your mail account
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 http://m6.net Fast, reliable and
affordable Windows 2000 web farm hosting.