Icethunder – Your place for webhosting stuff!
Email options for your hosting
The last time I was talking about how to upload and download files you want to add/remove to/from your server. This time I will try to explain E Mail aliases to you in more detail as it is another commonly found term when looking for a web host.
Imagine you have a web site. You get tons of traffic. In fact you get more traffic, than your package is able to accommodate. And than, one day your site is down. How does your poor visitor [me] knows, what has happened? Well, you can make a customer “error page” and inform them about a certain problem and include an email link for “emergency” contact.
Well, you say, that sounds good and I will include my own e-mail address. And I will do more, I will use my own – personal – gmail.com or yahoo.com email address in the contact area of my web site just in case. That’s all WRONG! It’s maybe the stupidest thing ever. In under a hour you would be overwhelmed with spam messages. Why? Because your email address would quickly become not a private one, but a public one! Every spam bot would copy it and than try to distribute spam to it. In a few weeks you would decide to make a new personal email address and close this one.
But it is not so bad as it looks, because your host also provides you the ability to create a certain amount of e-mail addresses too! The number [how many addresses] you will be able to create vary greatly, but I do not think you will ever use all of them, but it’s good to have one admin, support and feedback address. You will get a lot of spam, but at least you will be able to sort your visitors and their desires.
What have I done… I started to talk about address before I even discussed what they are… . Well, an email address is an electronic mail account you are able to create and than use for your own purposes. An email address is used to send and receive electronic mail. It’s very important to say you should look at what features are supported before you decide for a certain host if you really think your email address will be an important thing for your online presence.
You can access your mail by one of many different ways. It’s like with FTP – there is a secure and an insecure way. And more there is an easier and harder way.
Before I will introduce what I mean under security I think I should first of all tell you what access methods there are. But remember this is not a tutorial about what is IMAP/POP3/SMTP. I will describe them only briefly and thus you should look at all of them more deeply if you want to know exactly how they work!
IMAP/POP3
I hope you know something about these two protocols. They are both responsible for getting your mail from your mail server to your mail client. The first one is the easier and better one [better - depends on your personal taste]. It allows you to access your email on the server, but it allows you to manage your email offline too. POP3 has the same ability, but it also downloads all your mail to your home computer and if you did not specify you want to leave your mail on the server you will be terribly surprised if you forget to back-up your mail and have a disk failure at home. All your mail is lost. If you would use IMAP you could work with your mail offline [download it to your desktop], but at the same time IMAP would leave all the messages at your mail server. This is a great thing to know! I did not use an IMAP once in my life and after my computer crashed I was horrified. All my mail has gone!
SMTP
This is the Simple Mail transfer protocol and as you might already know it is the protocol responsible for mail delivery. While trying to figure out how to configure it in your mail client it’s good to know you will need to supply your login name and password for the account you are trying to send mail trough. Some servers require you to use “secure connection [e.g. SSL, TLS]”.
The two methods to access your mail!
Mail Client
You know this way very good. You download Thunderbird, Lotus Notes or you just use Microsoft’s Outlook. It does not matter what option you use, because you will always use what’s called a Mail Client. It makes your life easy, because it downloads all your mail to your desktop and it also knows how to send it to the recipient. Of course you need to configure it first!
A very interesting thing to look at when you have decided for a host is whether or not it allows secure connection. If not all your data is visible to any potential sniffer between you and your host’s mail sever, but the most of hosts do not offer this feature, or it’s hard to determine if they do or not. And this is why it’s so good to use the second option [secure] at public places – Internet Cafe’s, at Airports or any kind of unsecured Wifi hot spot! The difference between a secure and unsecure way is in the port used for communication and the fact, that a secure session is encrypted – all the data passing between your PC and your mail server is encrypted!
The other way is to use another feature of your web host. A so called “WebMail”. It’s an easy way access your email and it is more SECURE! Most of the time the WebMail option is encrypted and thus your whole session is secured. This does not work with Mail Client most of the time, because not many host do offer secure connection to your own email accounts trough mail clients. And do not forget – if they offer a secure way to connect to your mail client you have to configure it in your client first!
The second option works like Gmail or Yahoo, where you login to your mail account trough a secure (https) site and your session is than secured too – this varies from host to host, either your login will be secured by SSL or your whole session. Check with your host.
More about POP3, IMAP and SMTP can be found here:
I hope you found here what you were looking for. If not just try to ask in the comment area and I will try to add an explanation to anything I have forgotten about e-mails. Have a nice day and do not forget to check regularly or just Subscribe to my RSS feed to get all the new articles to your RSS Reader when they are published!
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