Everything you will ever need to know about emails and then some.

One of the most common support questions we receive at YWD is “I need help setting up my email”. Emails are so easy to send and receive, but setting up an email account isn’t always that straight forward.

First some email best practices for businesses. It is not okay to have “gmail” or “hotmail” or “rogers” as part of your email address - jane@rogers.com - will not make you sound legitimate. If you are running a business and want to be perceived as credible, you need an email address that includes your domain (which should be your business name), such as gustavo@yourwebdepartment.com.

For the purposes of this article, I am going to assume you have already secured your domain name with someone other than YWD,...if you still need to reserve a domain name, we will need to address that in a different post.

Email basics - what it is and what it needs to work

If you choose to set up your email account with YWD or if you choose to use an option like Google Apps, you will be asked to go to your DNS (most time is the same place where you purchased your domain name) to change your MX Record.

I am going to get geeky on you for a moment - but you need to know this information to set up your email on your own.

An email address requires a domain. When you have your own domain, the settings are kept in a Domain Name Server (DNS), the part for email is called MX Record. The MX Record tells the world where the email server is for your domain. For YWD accounts, the URL is like this: mail.yourdomain.com.

Email set-up sound too complicated?
If all this is more than you want to deal with, as always, we are more than happy to help. YWD provides email accounts for our clients and we complete all the set-up. We include email accounts with all our different packages:

$25/month: includes 3 email addresses
$49/month: 10 email addresses
$99/month: 25 email addresses

Additional emails:
$2/month per email address.

Looking for a free email option?
For free email accounts, I like Google Apps; it provides other useful tools and most important, it also gives you access to a Google+ account. It is free for up to 10 accounts and if you need more than that you can use the Business package at $50/year per account.

Want to learn more about email?

Then please, keep reading!

POP, IMAP, SMPT and email clients - what does it all mean?

POP (Post Office Protocol) allows you to download email messages to your PC, it is what most of us have used for years and is ideal if you only use one device. With POP, you have the option to keep emails on the server but, since few people choose this option, once an email is downloaded form the server, it gets deleted.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is the protocol to use if you like to check email from multiple devices (PC, phone and or tablets). IMAP synchronizes your emails between all devices and web based interfaces. It is the protocol that enables you to open an email on your computer and still see that same email on your iPhone.

Email clients is the software you use to access email on your PC or on other devices, such as Microsofts Outlook or Apples’s Mail.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), this is the server used to send mail (outgoing mail). For YWD clients this is the same as the incoming server and we recommend using either one of these ports: 465 or 587. By default is port 25, but most ISPs in a effort to fight spam they block port 25 for SMTP server that are not their own.

Your email had been set up, next step, setting up email access on your PC
You know how much we love to help, that is why offer to do all your email set up for you. The one thing we can’t do is physically set up your email client - the software like Outlook or Mail that you use to access email on your PC. But as always we can provide help through our online help section:

• Accessing your mailbox
• Setting up Microsoft Outlook (Windows)
• Setting up Mail (Mac)
• Setting up email on an iPhone

Are you now an email expert?

At YWD we have been setting up email addresses for years, much of this is second nature to us, taking on this service to help our clients is easy for us. So how did we do explaining it? Did this help? Do you have more questions? I would love to hear what you think.