Using E-Mail with Your Company's Domain Name

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Web Marketing Today, Issue 37, October 1, 1997

---

Too often I see CEOs with company websites using their own personal e-mail addresses to conduct business. Usually this is a result of ignorance, both of the message it sends and the technology of e-mail. When you use your joeshmoe@aol.com address for company business it:

• Undermines the company image
• Defeats development of brand identity
• Communicates smallness
• Looks unprofessional

Marketing your company on the Web has to do with projecting your company's image by means of both your Web site and your e-mail messages. Often, though, new web users don't understand how to use their new company domain name for all their e-mail, and with good reason -- it's complicated. We'll try to simplify a rather complex, technical subject so it makes sense to ordinary business people. Larger companies on a network probably have their own e-mail server which receives mail and distributes it throughout the company -- and a computer tech to set it up. But what about smaller companies?

Types of Internet Providers

First, let's distinguish between two kinds of Internet providers:

• Web Hosting Service is the company which has your Web pages on its computer and displays them over the Internet.
• Dial-Up Internet Service Provider (ISP) provides a phone number which your modem can connect with, giving you access to the Internet.

Often these are two different companies. It's been my experience that the dial-up access companies are sometimes inattentive to Web hosting needs. And Web hosting services generally don't provide any dial-up access at all, since often they are in a different part of the country altogether.

So you're the sales manager at Osofine, Inc. in South Florida. How do you get e-mail delivered to your company's domain which is being hosted by your Web hosting service in Chicago?

Your POP E-Mail Box is the place where your e-mail messages are stored until you log in and download them. (POP stands for Post Office Protocol.) Your dial-up access ISP includes a POP E-Mail Box along with your dial-up account, and business accounts often include several POP boxes. To keep it clear in our minds, let's call your personal POP E-Mail address josephine@verylocal.net which is located physically on your local South Florida dial-up ISP's computer.

There are two ways for you to get messages from your company domain name -- osofine.com -- which is tied to your Web hosting service in Chicago. The first is forwarding.

Forwarding

Your Web hosting service in Chicago can program your account so all mail sent to the osofine.com domain will automatically be forwarded to josephine@verylocal.net in South Florida. The e-mail hits the server in Chicago, and is sent on to South Florida. Incidentally, most Web hosting services allow you to have multiple "aliases" which forward to different e-mail addresses. For example, sales@osofine.com would to go to josephine@verylocal.net while service@osofine.com to go to your customer service manager, jimbob11175@aol.com, his own personal e-mail address.

Using the forwarding approach, you'd log on to verylocal.net and then have your e-mail program download any messages waiting in your local POP E-mail box under the username josephine. And similarly, Jim Bob could get his e-mail through America Online.

Return Address

You don't want to give out your personal e-mail address, however, so you set the return address on your e-mail program for sales@osofine.com, even though you physically sent the mail from your personal account. This is a very commonly used approach: forward mail from your company's domain to your local e-mail address, and then set your return address so it reflects your official company e-mail address. This works pretty well, and no one will know unless they study all those confusing headers at the beginning of the message.

Pop E-Mail Box on the Web Hosting Computer

The second way to receive e-mail is to access the POP E-Mail Box on your Web hosting service computer. Getting confused? Think of it this way. You can have a personal POP e-mail box with your local dial-up ISP in South Florida and a business POP E-Mail Box with your Web hosting service in Chicago. Many (though not all) Web hosting services provide one to three POP e-mail boxes with the hosting account. You don't have to use them -- you can forward all your mail to your local POP E-Mail box -- but you could use the POP E-Mail box labeled sales@osofine.com in Chicago.

I don't want to make a long distance call from South Florida to Chicago, you protest. You don't have to. You set the modem dialer on your computer to dial up your local ISP in South Florida. Ring, ring, Bzzz, FlotttsssNik! It's connected. Now you set up the e-mail program on your computer (I use Eudora Pro, for example) so that your POP account is set to sales@osofine.com. (Note: this is different than your local dial-up username which is josephine.) Your e-mail program now requests all the e-mail which has accumulated in your sales@osofine.com POP e-mailbox in Chicago and downloads it to your desktop computer. (Some Web hosting services allow you to send mail, also, from an SMTP [Simple Mail Transfer Protocol] program on their computer.)

Traveling

Now that you know about POP e-mail boxes, you know that you don't have to phone up your dial-up ISP from Stuttgart, Germany, when you want to check your e-mail on trips abroad. If you can get access using a friend's local dial-up access account in Stuttgart, you can download the e-mail from your POP e-mail box in South Florida or Chicago. Some dial-up ISPs now offer a reciprocal "roaming service" with ISPs in other parts of the world to accommodate business travelers with laptops.

You should never again have to give out your personal e-mail account for business. Instead, give out an e-mail address with the company domain name such as sales@osofine.com. Personnel in your company come and go, but their "function's" e-mail address -- sales@osofine.com -- remains the same for the life of the company. Alternatively, each employee can have his or her own company e-mail address, such as jim_bob@osofine.com.

All you'll have to change is an alias or a password. Pretty slick way to project your company's image via e-mail.