Email forwarding - some thoughts
from Paul L.G. Morris: an experienced, respected and qualified Computer Advisor.
About email forwarding
Most suppliers of domain registration offer a number of services when you register with them. This usually includes email, email forwarding and mailboxes. This enables you to use for your business an email address such as 'sales@mycompany.co.uk'. For a business you may often want to manage more than 1 email address.
The mailboxes are the method where you use a 'client' such as Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird to access these business emails and download them onto your PC. For some businesses this is a valid method of receiving email, but it does limit you to managing the email from the one PC. If these mailboxes are neither forwarded nor managed, they will eventually fill up with spam - as has happened to other clients of mine.
Another method of managing them is to forward the emails to another email address, either web-based (such as a Google Gmail address or one from Hotmail or Yahoo) or that supplied with your internet connection (Tiscali, Orange, Demon etc.)
You can usually forward email that was addressed to a specific name (such as 'sales@mycompany.co.uk') to your other email address (such as a Gmail address). You can also setup a 'catch-all' that will forward emails received on any other name (such as 'info@mycompany.co.uk') to a specified address.
If you set up a 'catch-all' to forward any unrecognised address to you, then in time you may find that you are getting a lot of spam. In this case it may be better to reject unrecognised names. You may like to set up 'webmaster' as a name - this could be useful for anyone wishing to communicate with the owner of a website. However, this can attract spam in its own right.
If you manage your email with a web-based service, such as Gmail, it enables you to manage your email from any web browser - you are not tied to a specific PC.
Should you use Gmail as a client to manage all your emails with the one account, you can set it up so that when you reply to sales@mycompany.co.uk email, the address that is shown on the reply is sales@mycompany.co.uk, not Gmail. The principle is:
1) Register the new email address with Gmail
2) Gmail will send a verification email to that address (to ensure you are the user of it)
3) Click on the link in the verification email.
When set up, you can (within the Gmail settings) determine how you respond. The best way is that when you reply, the reply comes from the address that was used by the original sender.
To summarise:
This is the method I use for managing emails from 4 different website-based addresses.
The mailboxes are the method where you use a 'client' such as Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird to access these business emails and download them onto your PC. For some businesses this is a valid method of receiving email, but it does limit you to managing the email from the one PC. If these mailboxes are neither forwarded nor managed, they will eventually fill up with spam - as has happened to other clients of mine.
Another method of managing them is to forward the emails to another email address, either web-based (such as a Google Gmail address or one from Hotmail or Yahoo) or that supplied with your internet connection (Tiscali, Orange, Demon etc.)
You can usually forward email that was addressed to a specific name (such as 'sales@mycompany.co.uk') to your other email address (such as a Gmail address). You can also setup a 'catch-all' that will forward emails received on any other name (such as 'info@mycompany.co.uk') to a specified address.
If you set up a 'catch-all' to forward any unrecognised address to you, then in time you may find that you are getting a lot of spam. In this case it may be better to reject unrecognised names. You may like to set up 'webmaster' as a name - this could be useful for anyone wishing to communicate with the owner of a website. However, this can attract spam in its own right.
If you manage your email with a web-based service, such as Gmail, it enables you to manage your email from any web browser - you are not tied to a specific PC.
Should you use Gmail as a client to manage all your emails with the one account, you can set it up so that when you reply to sales@mycompany.co.uk email, the address that is shown on the reply is sales@mycompany.co.uk, not Gmail. The principle is:
1) Register the new email address with Gmail
2) Gmail will send a verification email to that address (to ensure you are the user of it)
3) Click on the link in the verification email.
When set up, you can (within the Gmail settings) determine how you respond. The best way is that when you reply, the reply comes from the address that was used by the original sender.
To summarise:
- Your client sends an email to 'sales@mydomain.co.uk'
- Email forwarding sends this onto 'myname@gmail.com' (your personal account)
- You can log into your Gmail account from any PC with a browser and internet connection
- You reply to your client as 'sales@mydomain.co.uk', keeping your Gmail address private.
A number of accounts can be managed this way
This is the method I use for managing emails from 4 different website-based addresses.