Send and receive messages using your business email address (domain name) since it is more professional than a yahoo or aol or gmail address.
Utilize email marketing and newsletters to drive traffic to your site and keep your mailbox clean with anti-spam software.
Webmail Options
Your website email can be accessed by either:
- Logging directly into the webmail server with your email address and password
(usually at http://mail.yourdomain.com (or) - Forwarding incoming messages to a personal address such as Comcast or Yahoo (or)
- Adding your email address(es) to POP mail software such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora,
Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera Mail, or Pegasus
The last option (POP) can be best for several reasons.
You can receive AND send from your business address, which you can’t do if you simply forward messages. You can also add anti-SPAM software to reduce junk messages. Prices for those programs range from free to $50/year. I’m using one called Cloudmark Anti-SPAM that costs $40/year, but it does a great job…. Or just search for “anti spam”.
If you use Comcast or Verizon or another ISP for email and log in to their website to access it, you can instead add that to Outlook, etc. as your primary account and then add your website email address(es) as well.
These POP email clients also offer formatting of messages with color, html, etc that can’t be done with the basic webmail server and you can use the same address book for all of your email accounts. A disadvantage is that you must have the POP software installed on each computer you would use for your email.
Website Mail Anti-SPAM Measures
Email problems have become more commonplace, largely due to increasing amounts of SPAM and the different methods that email providers use to combat it. Website owners are more vulnerable since we want and need visitors to contact us.
Spam Filter for Outlook, Express and Mozilla Firefox. Download SPAMfighter today.
Email addresses are collected by Spammers in many ways. Robots cruise the internet and can read Addresses that are in text form on websites. They can also read simple email links that open email programs. It can also be risky to submit your email address to any website or chain-email that you cannot verify as friendly.
Prevention: For my websites and those I design, I exclusively use email forms (Form Mail) that can be better protected than simple email links. To display an address, I create an image instead of using active links or even text.
Problems: Email providers have been going to great lengths to try to protect their users from the epidemic of spam. The side effects are spam filters blocking good messages along with the bad (aol and yahoo are famous for this) and any messages from certain servers blocked completely. Most websites, such as yours and mine, are located on “Shared Servers” so we don’t have to pay several hundred dollars each year for hosting. If there are Spammers using web addresses on the same server, all mail coming from that server may be considered SPAM and potentially be blocked. These “blacklisted” accounts can be re-instated (“whitelisted”) manually, but have often fallen back into the bad category.
Purge your webmail servers: If your email forwards to your personal address, be sure to delete unneeded messages from the “inbox” periodically at mail.yourdomain.com or ask ray to have inbound messages be automatically deleted from that server. This is especially important if you receive messages with large file attachments which can fill up the mailbox and make it slow to open. If there are hundreds of messages, I could delete and re-instate the mailbox quickly, but you’d lose any saved inbox and sent messages on the webmail server.
Actions to take:
- Seriously consider adding your website email to a POP client (Outlook, etc.)
- To screen out spam, install some anti-spam software.
- If you haven’t received website email recently, fill out the form on your site to be sure you do receive it and contact me if it isn’t received at least within a day. We may need to request “whitelisting”.
- Refrain from listing your email address on pages of your site that you’re equipped to update yourself. Many people use a secondary address such as a free Yahoo or Juno or Gmail account in that case.
Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome.
…and since referrals to my business earn you free maintenance time, that would allow me to upgrade your spam defenses at no cost!
Best Regards,
Webmaster Ray (302) 633-1482