Web Hosting and Email - Basics explained

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What is Email?

Email is short for electronic mail, which is the delivery of digital messages over the Internet between two electronic devices. A mailbox, often called a "POP account" in MailCentral, is an area on the network where email is received and stored. Although there are other types of mailboxes available, such as Exchange or IMAP, the basics are the same - every type of mailbox has a unique address (email address) which identifies it much like your home address identifies a unique location.

When you purchase a web hosting package, included in your membership is a number of mailboxes. A mailbox can store emails, or it can forward them to a designated location, or both - store and forward. A mailbox that stores its messages (whether it then forwards them or not) takes up disk space and memory from the total quota allowed by your web hosting account.

Why Forward?

Using a Forward - an email address that doesn't store messages, but forwards them to a different mailbox - can help you get organized and present a more professional e-commerce web site to your clients. For example, say you have a small business, named Flowers By Lisa. You have purchased a commerce enabled web hosting plan, which includes a domain name and mailboxes (among other things). You have selected a domain, www.FlowersByLisa.info, and created the following mailboxes: orders@FlowersByLisa.info, support@FlowersByLisa.info, and Lisa@FlowersByLisa.info. Instead of checking 3 different mailboxes every time you wish to check your email, you can configure the first two to be Forwards, so that when they receive an email, they immediately redirect this message to your Lisa@FlowersByLisa mailbox without storing an unnecessary copy of the message. You could place the Orders address on your web pages that contain your on-line store, whereas your Support address could go on the invoice verification email.

You could also configure your Forwards to direct your messages to another mailbox outside of your web hosting account, such as Yahoo, MSN, or Google mail. For example, you could redirect your Forwards to FlowersByLisa@gmail.com, which is a Google email address, external to your web hosting account.

Accessing your email

There are several types of applications that can help you access your email: WebMail, 3rd party software, and hand held devices. These types of applications are called email clients. Email clients download mail messages from the server (the area of the network where these messages are received and stored), and can present them to you in the format you configure. For example, email clients allow you to set up filters and folders for better organization of your mail. Using the example above, you could configure Microsoft Outlook (a 3rd party email client) to automatically store all emails with an orders@FlowersByLisa.info address to a folder called Invoices. Then, when you check your Outlook mailbox, you can immediately see how many new orders you received in your Invoices folder.

Unwanted email, aka Spam

Just like traditional postal mail, email addresses are often targets mass promotional items, and other campaigns. These unwanted messages are call Spam. Included in your web hosting package you will find excellent spam filtering tools. You choose the level of filtering that is right for you - high, medium, or low. You also have an option to blacklist addresses, meaning that no email from the blacklisted address will ever reach your mailbox. Together, the available tools of your website hosting package provide an effective protection against spam.