Top 8 Professional Email Hosting Providers for Small Business

In modern society people are so familiar and used to having an e-mail address and using electronic mail that it is hard to believe that not so long ago having your own e-mail address was considered a luxury and not to mention an e-mail address @ your own domain. I believe that it is crucial for any business to have an adequate e-mail service provider and when you think about that almost every web hosting package includes e-mail hosting as well I keep wondering how a company can have their own website and domain name and keep using a free e-mail address with Yahoo or Gmail.

What is e-mail hosting?

E-mail hosting is the service that allows you to have your own e-mail address and a mailbox where you can receive messages that were sent to your e-mail address as well as send messages to others. Although e-mail hosting is provided as an additional service with any hosting package, you can also get a separate e-mail service provider. Unfortunately with the evolution of Internet and the e-mail service the spam messages have also increased tremendously and as a way of protecting yourself from spam you can use different e-mail addresses for different purposes.

For example you can use a free service provided by one of the large providers such as Gmail for a general e-mail address that you use to sign up for online accounts because when you provide the e-mail address on a website, especially if it is not secured, there is a great risk of some spammer finding that address and adding it to a list.

Features of e-mail hosting

When you are getting an e-mail hosting service regardless of whether it is along with a website hosting package or a standalone service, you should know some of the key features and options that might be provided. If you know what each of these features is for, you will know what to look for according to your needs:

E-mail accounts – this is a feature that shows you how many different e-mail accounts or mailboxes you can have and this is a characteristic feature when the e-mail service is a part of a web hosting package.

E-mail aliases – the alias is basically another name used for something that already exists so the e-mail alias is just a different e-mail address for the same mailbox.

POP3 and IMAP server – these are two types of e-mail protocols that allow you to access your e-mail through specialized software called a mail client like MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Mac Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc.

SMTP server – this is the e-mail protocol for the outgoing mail server and thus this feature allows you to send messages. Be sure to get familiar with the restrictions ( if any) imposed by your provider regarding the number of messages that you can send per hour and per day.

E-mail forwarding – this is a useful feature that allows you to redirect all messages sent to a particular address to another e-mail address that you use.

Auto-responder – this feature is also quite useful because it allows you to set up a pre-set message that will be sent automatically to anyone that has sent you an e-mail message. For example an auto-responder can be set up on your business e-mail address when you are on vacation to inform people when you will be back to attend to your e-mails.

Catch-all address – this feature is particularly useful for business e-mails and it allows you to receive all e-mail messages that were sent to non-existing address but within your domain. For example if you use the domain name example.com and you have the e-mail address info@example.com but someone mistypes that and sends a message to infos@example.com you will receive that message in the catch-all mailbox.

Mailing lists – this feature allows you to send the same message to multiple recipients at the same time – it sends the messages to all e-mail addresses that have been subscribed to the particular mailing list.

E-mail filters – this feature allows you to determine rules about what to do with all messages that fit a certain description. For example you can set up a filter for all e-mail messages sent from a particular e-mail address to be moved to a certain folder. E-mail filters are also used for increasing the protection from spam.

Anti-virus protection – this feature scans all your e-mails for viruses and any message that is marked as a threat will not be delivered to your mailbox to keep your personal or office computer safe.

SPF protection – SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework and it is used to prevent sender address forgery. This allows you to protect your e-mail address from being used for sending spam messages.

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