Email services

Do make sure you can use an email address like your.name@your-domain-name.com You are not alone in your frustration about how email works, it’s an old system and difficult to change but our expertise can at least improve your experience.

There are numerous ways to set up email services and minimise the amount of junk mail reaching you.  This isn’t the place to detail all the possibilities but I will highlight just a few:

• We can provide mailboxes as part of your hosting at £20p.a. per 500MB but there are better alternatives.
• We can forward email addressed to your.name@your-domain-name.com to any other email service of your choice 
• Do ensure your email service provides two factor (2FA) authentication.  That makes it far harder for a hacker to gain access.
• An email address like  your.name.9673@your-broadband-provider.com not only looks unprofessional but the email service broadband providers offer is typically very poor.  You need an address like your.name@your-domain-name.com, one way to provide that at minimal cost is to use mail-forwarding such that mail to that address is redirected to another email account (possibly the one that comes with your broadband service but there are much better alternatives) .
• You can configure a mail address to send copies of everything to a second address, this can be useful as a backup or so the MD gets a copy of all the PA’s correspondence for example.
• Before Mobile Phones provided email services, for several years I used a service that, if it identified certain key phrases in an email, would trigger an automatic text message to my mobile phone such that I would be alerted to issues that needed urgent attention.  I still use a similar facility to forward an alert when someone leaves an answerphone message.
• In some situations it’s possible for you to update content in your web site by sending an email to a confidential address.

We can help set up email in these and many other ways to make it smarter and more productive.

The best email services come at a small cost (about £50 p.a. per mailbox) from such as Google, Microsoft and ProtonMail.  If you don’t need everything the paid versions offer, the free services from the same providers are still far better than any other free email services.
One of the benefits of those paid services is the option to use their mailservers to send email as if from an address using your domain name.  If you don’t want to pay for mailboxes mail-forwarding provides almost the same benefit.

The big problem with email is that it dates back long before the internet, originally built for a small technical community. There was no expectation that it would become a global phenomenon and nobody had considered that it would be misused and cause us all so many problems with spam and attached viruses.  Any change to those underlying standards is painfully slow because any changes have to be implemented on millions of mail servers and billions of end-user computers and mobile phones.