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Almost any web hosting service you sign up with will offer you email capability within your account. This can be good or bad, depending on how you intend to use it. There are some definite advantages, as well as some possible shortcomings. Let’s take a quick look at these, and help lay it out for you so you can make the best decision for web hosting email needs.
Hosting email accounts on your own domain has one very obvious advantage, that being the ability to help brand yourself, your site, and your business. It’s a lot more authoritative to have your emails coming from steve@yourbrand.com than it would be from a generic email account, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or even Gmail. Over time this helps with branding, as well as establishing a permanent address for your business, which helps with trust and customer loyalty.
One of the first things to do is to see if the host is offering you enough email accounts for your needs. Will you be expanding your business in the near future? If so, you want to be sure that you have email accounts available for those needs. Also, there needs to be adequate storage for that mail. If your company does a ton of email, this is something you need to know.
Also determine the format the email service is configured on. Is it POP, IMAP, or web based email? All of these work in different ways, with POP having you access your account through an email client, IMAP roughly the same though through more than one computer, and web based email is where you go to a third party service and access your email through them, easily the least desirable of the three.
Some hosting companies will offer an email list building capability within their email service. Most of these are not adequate for what you need when it comes to building and maintaining a mailing list. You are far better off using one of the better services out there for this type of thing, and two of the best are Aweber and GetResponse. They can keep abreast of all the legal issues and keep you in the clear in that regard, as well as maintaining and organizing your various lists for you. Both of these companies are very capable and can manage your lists better than you can on your own account in most every case.
Web hosts should also offer other features such as vacation forwarding and email forwarding, among many others.
Understand also that sometimes email accounts on shared hosting accounts can be very subject to a great deal of spam. Make sure they are at least trying to deal with that problem.
One of the reasons to use an email account on your domain is for anonymity sake. If you are in a market where you are trying to corner the market with various web properties, it’s sometimes useful to not let your competitors know it is you. You may have a slew of sites feeding links to other sites, and would just as soon not be on the radar. An anonymous email can help with that.
Using the email from your web hosting account can work for you, just make sure that it contains what you need and that you’re not asking it to do things it’s not really suited to do.
