Factors To Consider For Hosting Your Email

A number of web hosting providers come with the ability to host your email address. For a small business owner, that may seem redundant and unnecessary since it’s a lot easier to advertise your Gmail or Outlook email address instead. While this is not a deal-breaker for many customers, such free email service providers come with their own set of baggage.

Unprofessional: Free email services are good for personal use. But they may come across as unprofessional for business uses.

Missed Opportunities: A lot of inbound customer inquiries come to email addresses you provide on your business cards, flyers and other offline channels. Typos in such instances are quite common and this leads to missed business opportunities since your customer might end up emailing an address that does not belong to you.

Hosting your own email is professional. It also makes it possible for business owners to customize their setup to suit their unique business needs. Here are some factors to consider while hosting your own business email.

Storage

Pick an email hosting service that provides sufficient storage space. As a business, you may not want to lose past communication records with your customers. This is necessary from both a marketing and legal perspective. Pick an email host that provides storage and backup facilities that suit your requirements.

Security

Security is a big part of email communication and it is extremely important for you to pick a hosting service that takes email security seriously. The most established form of security is TLS (Transport Layer Security) which is used by common email hosting providers. TLS encrypts the data that is transmitted between the email server and the client and this prevents intrusion from any third party users. Other forms of security include Bitmessage, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), OpenPGP, GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) and S/MIME.

Catch-all emails

As pointed out earlier in this article, typos in email addresses are a lot more common than expected. An email hosting service with catch-all feature enabled ensures that even email addresses that were not marked to the intended recipient gets delivered to the admin or any other designated user. This way, no inbound inquiry is lost in transit.

Spam Filter

While catch-all email addresses make sure that all inbound inquiries are attended to, they also lead to excessive spam. Not only this, unsolicited emails clutter your inbox, take up unnecessary storage space and drastically bring down the productivity of your team. An effective spam filter makes sure that all unsolicited emails are caught before it reaches the inbox of your users.

IMAP Facility

A lot of email providers will make you believe that IMAP and POP are just two different ways to do the same thing - access your emails remotely. While that is partially true, it is important to know the difference between these two protocols. The POP protocol lets you download the email from the remote server to your local device. This is one-way transmission which means that if your users access their email from multiple devices like their laptop, smartphone and tablet, their actions from one device does not impact the experience on the other device. In other words, you are required to mark emails as read or delete them separately on each of your devices. IMAP on the other hand is a two-way communication and stores the actions taken from one device (like your laptop) on the remote server. This synchronizes your experience across various devices. If you have a business email that is shared by various employees (support email, for example), it is important to pick a host with IMAP facility lest you have the same email responded to by multiple users from your team.