One key question that small business startups face is how to setup their email system. There are two distinct approaches - running your own email server, or subscribing to an email hosting service. This article will only deal with email hosting solutions.
To setup a professional email solution you need to deal with two parts - the domain name under which your company will be known and communicate with its partners and customers (user@domainname.com), and the email service for your domain name - storage, email aliases, etc.
Using your own domain
As a Small Business Startup, it is important to establish your professional identity in all your communication. In this era of email and web, that means you will have to register your own domain name. You can do so when you sign up for a web hosting package (the traditional approach), when you simply purchase a domain name through a domain management provider (1&1, GoDaddy, Active-Domain, etc), or even as a feature of an email hosting service you subscribe to.
Which path should you take? If web presence is by far the more important part of your business model then you should optimize your choice for the best web hosting package that meets your needs.
If web is secondary to customer/partner communication, I would optimize for the right email solution and deal with web hosting separately.
Email hosting choices
There are a gazillion email hosting choices and offerings on the web. You can sort them out in the following manner:
1) User access method - Web Interface, POP, IMAP or Microsoft Exchange;
2) Storage capacity - anything from 10MB to 2GB per email address;
3) Features - email aliases, forwarding, backup, mobile phone access, etc.
4) Price - free to $/month.
User Access Method
The consideration for choosing the right method are the following:
- do you need to access your email via an email application (Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Outlook, Entourage, etc)? Or can you live only with a web-based email client (like Gmail or Hotmail)? If you need to use a client application then you must have support for POP, IMAP or Exchange.
- do you need to access your email from more than 1 PC (like a desktop at work and a laptop on-the-go)? If so then POP is not the best solution for you.
- do you need to have access to more sophisticated features like Smartphone access, full calendaring, higher security requirements, etc. If so you may want to consider a Hosted Exchange solution.
Recommended solution - IMAP
I recommend using an IMAP provider as a great choice for simplicity and flexibility of use, and overall value.
A typical IMAP email provider offers web access to email, compatibility with popular and powerful email editing and management applications (Outlook, OSX Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc), multiple PC email synchronization, and server retention of email (within the limits of assigned email storage quota).
How does IMAP work?
IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) differs from POP email in that 1) IMAP allows email to exist in multiple locations at once - the main IMAP email server, and local copies on one or more computers; 2) IMAP allows two-way synchronization of email between the server and a client PC.
With IMAP, Email gets copied, rather than moved, between the server and the local PCs, so you can access your email from more than 1 PC, you can manage and compose email offline, and you can then synchronize the local copy of emails with the server.
POP, by comparison, only allows email to exist in one location (either the server or one local PC) and only allows transfers from the server down to one local client (hence you cannot sync your local email with a POP server). Once you access a POP email server with your email client (Outlook, etc) the email is moved from the server to your local PC and deleted from the server. You cannot access this email from another PC. If you access your POP server from more than 1 PC you will fragment your email across these PCs, with your messages split between these various machines. Very messy!
Signing up for an IMAP provider
If you want to try out IMAP and see if it fits your needs, you can sign up with a free IMAP email providers, a list of which is found here: http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_imap.htm
FastMail.net is an up-and-coming IMAP email provider that has a free offer you can try and later expand to one of their many paying offers if you want more space and bandwidth.
More than likely you will subscribe to some commercial service to get the email storage space and email features you want. I chose to go with 1&1.com, a large web and email host based in Germany (and aggressively going for market share in the US).