Choosing the right email system for your needs

Email is the most popular form of business communication in Ireland today. Most businesses opt to use an email address at their own domain, and few are foolish enough to rely on leaving large amounts of mail in their web-mail accounts with an Internet service provider (ISP).

So you have taken the step of setting up emails at your own domain, become quite adept at using web mail and downloading mail into your mail programme locally. But whats behind this system and what questions should you be asking about security of information and reliability of service?

All email systems are not created equal. And when hosting servers go down or backups are lost, it is often the loss of email that causes the most problems. Yet our email systems are sometimes taken for granted and often not even backed up regularly. if your email is mission critical then you should not be relying just on the free POP mail that comes with your hosting package.

Ask any IT company about email and, if you have 5 or more email accounts they are probably going to suggest installing an email server locally and creating remote access through a programme like Microsoft Exchange. Here is our no nonsense guide to understanding what they are talking about and getting what you need!

Some questions to ask:

• Do you have an accessible and secure backup of your email messages?
• If your internet connection fails can you still access your emails and will emails be backed up during the outage?
• Can you access your emails from multiple locations?
• Whats the best and most secure way to handle your email?
• Are your stored emails slowing down your PC or server?
• Would you be better using an external email provider than having a server in house?
• Is your ISP able to provide you with a 'reverse lookup' that will result in minimal spam filtering of mail from your server?

Some technical stuff

Most local e-mail programmes like Outlook use the Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over an internet connection.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the de facto standard for e-mail transmissions across the Internet. It is very common for email software to use SMTP to send mail and POP3 to receive it, but SMTP can be used to receive mail too.

If you have a standard email box from SitesToGo or any other shared hosting provider you will be using POP to receive email and SMTP to send it.

If you have a mail server running a system like Microsoft Exchange then you can choose whether to use SMTP or POP to receive emails. Using SMTP can cut out the Internet Service Provider (ISP) server and increase security and privacy, but if your Internet connection fails you do need a backup arranged with your ISP to hold mail or it will disappear into the ether!

If you have broadband from some ISP's like Last Mile, they may not be able to provide you with something called a 'reverse lookup' - a mechanism that is used by the receiving server to check your domain credentials. If this is the case by all means have a mail server to distribute mail internally but on no account have SMTP mail set up!

But you don't have to invest in a server to enjoy a more secure email service, there are service providers who specialise in providing secure SMTP email on shared servers with good backup options.

Want more advice? Ask us for one of our recommended IT partners in your area!