Website Hosting and Email

It's amazing how many websites have a Gmail, hotmail or Yahoo email address as a contact email address.

Using a free email account for your main contact doesn't appear very professional, and is totally unnecessary as you have excellent email addresses just waiting to be configured a part of your hosting package.

Not only that but what happens if you decide to cancel your free email address?

Your Hosting Package

When you purchase a domain name you can use it for:

• Hosting a website
• Email

 So a domain name like yoursitename.com could not only be used to host your website at www.yoursitename.com but also to provide a selection of email addresses like email@yoursitename.com.

It should be noted that the domain name needs to be linked to a website hosting service to be useful. The hosting provider provides, not just web hosting, but also email capabilities with the hosting package.

How many email addresses and how you access them depends on your hosting provider. However most will provide at least 5 addresses and POP3 access even with the most basic package.

Here are the email capabilities offered with 1and1 UK basic hosting package.

Most websites only require one or two email addresses like sales, newsletter, webmaster, accounts, contact.

If you are running a business with a few employees then there are enough spare addresses for everyone.

Main Email Terms Explained

• Autoresponders are automatic messages used mainly for acknowledgements. (see autoresponder article for more details)

• Email Aliases - An alias is an email address without its own mailbox. Instead the email is forwarded to another mailbox.

• Email Forwarding- A message (email) sent to email address A is delivered (by forwarding) to email address B. (see Website FAQs Email Forwarding)

• Catchall Address -This is an email address for the entire domain. It is designed to cover for the case of misspelled addresses.
  For example if someone sends an email to a user stevec@mysite.com (invalid) instead of steve@mysite.com (valid), then rather than sending an undeliverable message to the sender you can arrange the email to be sent to another mailbox (the catchall box).
  The problem with catchall addresses is that you can receive a lot of spam.

Web www.build-your-website.co.uk

• Email Marketing For Small Businesses
• Collecting Email Addresses
• Autoresponder Guide
• Autoresponder Review
• Hide Email Addresses