Email Services and Web Hosting
Email certainly has to be considered one of the more revolutionary services made possible by the Internet. It allows people who are far apart to quickly communicate with each other. The same things could be said for the telephone or telegraph. However there are some obvious advantages to email.
For one thing, unlike a telegraph, you can send an email from home. Emails can be written while you are offline and then connect for a short time to the Internet and send out your message, making email very cost effective.
Another advantage that email provides is that the person you are sending a message to doesn’t need to be there to get the message when you send it out.
Email may seem very ordinary for those of us who use it all the time, but in terms of its usefulness there is nothing about it that is ordinary.
One great thing about having a hosting account is that virtually all of them come with email capability as well. In most cases you will be able to set up a specific number of different email accounts and each can hold a certain amount of data.
Web Based Email
Another form of email capability is web based email. It comes with an added twist, which is that you can read and send emails through the use of a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox.
All you need to do is connect up to the internet and then log in at your email account with having any special software. Once you are logged in you can read, reply and also compose emails. There are many free web based email services like Yahoo mail, Gmail and Hotmail.
There are also some programs that are intermediaries that help you access your email by using a browser. Some of the more common of these services include Squirrel Mail, Horde and NeoMail. Some swear by one of these services as being better, however in terms of their functionality and look they are very similar.
A majority of hosts will allow you to access at least a few of these applications through your control panel. Most of these are developed for free and so it really doesn’t cost the hosting services that much.
POP, IMAP and SMTP
There are faster and more advanced ways to manage email. In order to do this specific email protocols were developed. When you use these protocols, there are programs that will provide you with faster and easier ways to read, delete, send and store your emails.
Some of the more better known software for doing these things include Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook Express and Outlook. Some people consider Mozilla Thunderbird to be a secure replacement for Outlook. If you do use Outlook Express it should be fairly easy to switch over.
To retrieve email, the most common protocols are IMAP (or Internet Message Access Protocol and POP (or Post Office Protocol). I have found IMAP to be a lot better.
POP is also called POP3, which stands for the newest version of POP.
There is one small but very important difference between POP and IMAP. When you use POP protocol, the emails by default that reside on the server get moved to your computer. They get copied onto your machine and then get deleted off of the server. There is an option, however, of setting up your email software to keep the emails on the server.
When you use IMAP, emails are also downloaded onto your computer, however the default is not to delete them off of the server. What that means is that you will be able to re-read the emails from any computer later by accessing the emails from your server. You make the decisions on when emails are to be deleted. When you set your email accounts up you need to pay close attention. If you do a good job the first time you will be set up for a very long time.
You may not think it makes a big difference whether or not your emails are on the server. However, in certain situations it could be significant. If you were away from home for a few days and were to verify your email using a different computer that uses POP without having the safety on, then you will need to save the emails onto a disk to reference them later because they will be deleted from the server. You should also archive any important emails in addition to retaining emails on the server.
Hosting servers can usually understand IMAP as well as POP. I prefer to use IMAP.
IMAP and POP both can be used for retrieving and managing emails, However another protocol gets used for sending email called STMP (which stands for Simple Mail Transport Protocol. With programs like Outlook you are able to set the SMTP server up at a different address, such as one that is provided by your ISP, than the one that is used for IMAP.
However, most hosting packages do include SMTP. It would be surprising if you didn’t get it. If your ISP does not offer a SMTP account for you to use, then you will need to have SMTP provided by your hosting service.
Spam
Although email is a wonderful communication device it can also be misused such as sending spam. Different people define spam email in different ways. Generally speaking, spam is a commercial message that you didn’t request. Or it could also mean any message that you didn’t request. Spam is definitely annoying. It is very costly in terms of the amount of time it takes for selecting and deleting unwanted emails.
Certain tools have been developed to help reduce spam. SpamAssasin is one of the most widely known and used of these tools. This is a mail filter which helps identify spam.
What spam filters do is use a set of specific rules to try to identify which of your emails are spam. Mostly these rules are based on the filter reading the emails and then making a determination on whether or not certain spam techniques or words have been used. The suspect emails are either marked or get separated out. If you receive lots of spam emails, a filter can really help deal with this problem.
Hosting Services and Email
Any respectable hosting package will include email capabilities. Today email is a basic service that having a website that doesn’t have email to go with it seems inconceivable. One major reason for registering a domain name is so that you get a unique email address like yourname@yourwebsitename.com.
Email needs to work and work well. You don’t want to miss any important emails. That is why you need to have reliable hosting. If your server goes down, so does your email. People may send emails to you, but you may never receive them.
Because so much of business these days in done using email, for some businesses not having downtime for their email is actually more important to them than not having downtime for their websites.
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