Email, Webmail, and Mail Servers
More fundamental than running a website is the importance of reliable email service. You have a number of options in how you set up your own email service for your company. You’ll be better equipped to choose the right option for yourself if you understand a little bit about how it all works.
Email and domain names
As you almost certainly know, email addresses take the following form:
name@example.com
Everything before the
@ sign is the local name, and everything after it is the domain name.
It is a very bad practice, and unfortunately much too common, for small organizations and sole practitioners to use a commercial email service with a domain name like
@gmail.com or@aol.com. This is a bad practice because it looks unprofessional, amateurish.
It’s a very minor point, but it has a big impact on the way your clients and potential customers think about you.
In an organization, such as a small business or (more commonly) a small non-profit, the too-common practice of using personal email addresses can introduce legal and ethical problems as well, because of the inevitable mixing and confusion between personal and professional communication. Also, email addresses controlled by the organization can be turned off, blocked, forwarded to another address, or taken over by another user.
Email servers and clients
Using email requires two things: an email server and an email client.
The email server is a piece of software that runs on the server (computer) and is constantly connected to the internet. It receives and processes any mail sent to it, and sends any mail you tell it to send.
The email client is the app you use to view your mail. This might be an app on your phone, something you view in a web browser, or a desktop application like Microsoft Outlook. The client checks the mail server for new messages, and stores them for viewing. It provides an interface for reading and writing messages. It sends outgoing messages to the server, which sends them to their intended recipients.
The server and the client are two different pieces of software, and they communicate using standardized protocols (POP and IMAP; see below). This means that the choice of server and choice of client are independent of each other.
People get confused about this all the time. One of the most often-heard reasons people have for not wanting to switch from their personal email addresses to organization-controlled email addresses is that they don’t want to have to change how they read and write email. They use Outlook, or Apple’s Email, and they think they will have to change. This is not the case.
Most email clients can connect to most email servers with no problem. Even better, most email clients can connect to multiple email servers and work with multiple email accounts at the same time. This means that someone who is using (for example) Outlook on their computer to check their personal email account can set it up to check their professional email as well.
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