How To Set-up Business E-mail Accounts

Get Your Own Domain Name.

I advise business clients to establish their own domain name, usually either a dot com or dot ca name. This serves many purposes both for e-mail and eventually setting up your own website. Your domain helps to establish your professional image and identity. It is easier to find you by e-mail or on the web. Your business looks more up to date and progressive. It also provides your permanent address that will not change in the future however you decide to connect to the internet.

In choosing a domain name you should strive to get as close as possible to your company name to avoid any confusion. It is also important to make the name easy to remember and easy to spell. Remember the goal is to make your business  domain name memorable and easy to use. Since the cost of registering a domain should be only $10 to $20 per year you could even have more that one. One might be your company name in full and the other can be an easy abbreviation that is easy to remember. The second name can be easily redirected to the main name so you still only have to maintain one e-mail account and website.

Unless you have an internal network with a sophisticated e-mail setup you may want to consider using a domain forwarding service to have your e-mail sent to automatically to the e-mail address your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has assigned you or you have chosen with your service. Most forwarding will allow you to redirect some e-mail addresses to different accounts. For instance you could redirect info@yourname.com to your assistant while you send webmaster@yourname.com to the person that handles your website. There is usually a catchall the sends everything else to one e-mail account. Therefore you can freely use any name before the domain when giving out e-mail addresses and still receive all the messages at your usual e-mail account. This can be very helpful in tracking special promotional campaigns or advertising effectiveness.

There are many websites that provide inexpensive domain registration and forwarding. A few that I have used are www.godaddy.com  and www.mydomain.com  for forwarding and .com names and www.budgetnames.ca for .ca names. You can check these or the many others that are available to compare pricing as this has become a very competitive market.

Protecting you e-mail address and avoiding spam.

Once you setup your own e-mail address you should take a few precautions to protect yourself from spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail and other junk). It will no longer be easy to change you e-mail address if it gets on to spam lists. Here are a few tips.

1.      Set up a free hotmail or yahoo account that you can use when you do personal surfing on the web. Contests and free web giveaways are very often a way to collect e-mail addresses for spam type activity. You can then only use you business e-mail addresses for real business purposes.

2.      Avoid putting your e-mail address on websites or newsgroups. Many spammers use software to search the web for e-mail addresses to add to their spam lists. You can avoid this by putting your address on your website as a graphic image so it cannot be read by an automated web search but will still be readable by your customers.

3.      If you use your e-mail in advertisements create a new address for each use. This helps you track the response and allows you to shut down a particular address if it gets on to a spam list.

4.      Setup a good spam filter to trap any spam that does get through to your e-mail account.

E-mail Client

Now that you have setup your e-mail domain you would forward it to your regular e-mail account that your ISP gives you. This way you do not need to check multiple places to get your e-mail. Now you need to customize your e-mail client so that your reply address is correct.

While incoming e-mail is all sent to the same account you want outgoing e-mail to be from either your personal account or your business account. You may even want to set up more then one business account such as info@yourname.com and sales@yourname.com. By setting up separate accounts in outlook or outlook express you can specify the return address for that account. You can then select which account any e-mail you send will appear to come from.