Small Business Email

Business Email Options, Services , Solutions, Setup and Use

Email has become just as essential to large and small businesses as the telephone.

In the early days of the Internet email solutions were mainly targeted at large businesses with dedicated systems like Microsoft exchange and Lotus notes and personal users with free services like Hotmail.

Small businesses were really left trying to use personal email systems for business use or investing in expensive systems not really suitable for their needs.

Today (2010) business grade profession email is available at very low costs by using externally hosted email systems.

In fact this type of solution is becoming so popular that even large companies are moving away from installing and running their own internal email systems to using third party hosted solutions.

Your Email Requirements

Before you can decide on the best solution you need to make a list of the main requirements like:

  • How many users.
  • Will you be sending/wanting to send large attachments e.g. files, pictures etc
  • How confidential is the email- standard email is as secure as the the standard post.
  • Do you already have an email solution that you need to migrate from.
  • Do have users that need access from a remote location?
  • Will you be using email on mobile phones (smart phones).
  • Do you have users that need to access each others email.
  • Do you currently have or will have very large mailboxes (>2GBytes)
  • Do you need to keep emails for a certain time period.
  • Do you need calendars, contacts and/or tasks

Email Solutions and Options

Email is often provided in conjunction with other services like calendars, tasks, shared data and it is really the necessity for advanced feature like this that determine your options.

Therefore you really need to decide if your primary need is for basic email or advanced email, defined as follows:

Basic Email -

  •  Send and receive email from a computer using either a web based client or desktop based client like Outlook.

Advanced Email-

  • Send and receive email from a computer using either a web based client or desktop based client like Outlook.
  • Send and receive email from a mobile phone
  • Share a calendar
  • Share files

Basic Email Provision

Although you can use free email providers like Yahoo email and Goggle email for providing basic email services I don't recommend them as the primary email solution but they can be useful when used in conjunction with a standard email account, as they provide advanced features like calendars that are not available in most standard email packages.

What do I mean by standard email?- This is an email mailbox using your own domain name allowing you to send and receive emails.

You can get a basic email account from dedicated providers but all web hosting companies provide basic email and so if you already have a website or are looking to get one then I would use the email that comes with the hosting package.

Also email services that are part of the hosting package can be cheaper if you have many users, as they don't charge per mailbox. See Using Email From Your Hosting Package.

 

Advanced Email Provision

The main solution for advanced email uses Microsoft exchange. Microsoft exchange is an email system used by large corporations that is now available to small businesses as a third party hosted solution made possible by the widespread use of broadband.

Third party Hosted exchange is also becoming popular with larger companies who want to outsource their email.

Here is a screenshot of some of the features you get.

Although the feature list may appear impressive it is important to understand what they are and whether or not you really need them.

However Microsoft Exchange isn't the only possibility as many are now also offering the open source exchange rival Open-Xchange.

Email Hosting Providers

For USA based business you may want to take a look at

1and1.com 

and UK based businesses

1and1.co.uk

Related Articles and resources:

Do You Have a Question ? The please Ask and I will do my best to answer.
Please note that I cannot answer support related questions.
Name:
Email address:
Question:

To Prevent Spam you are required to enter a validation code to confirm
 that you are a real person and not a machine. The code is 1234
Just enter this code in the box below before you send
Enter Code:

 

Useful Resources|SiteMap|Privacy Policy|Contact|About Me|

--------------------------------------------------------------------