Q&A › Business email
Why a gmail address costs you work, what it takes to send mail that arrives, and what the acronyms mean.
Email looks simple and is not. The difference between mail that lands and mail that vanishes is usually three DNS records nobody set up.
It works and it costs nothing. What it costs you is in the reading: an address at your own domain signals a business that intends to still be there next year. For trades quoting against competitors, it is a small, cheap credibility difference.
Different jobs on possibly different machines. Web hosting serves your pages; email hosting receives and stores your mail. Many providers bundle them, but they are separate services and you can — often should — buy them from different companies.
Three DNS records that prove your mail is really from you. SPF lists which servers may send as your domain. DKIM signs each message. DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks. Without them, modern providers increasingly treat your mail as suspicious.
Usually the records above are missing or wrong. After that: sending bulk mail from a normal mailbox, a domain with no sending history, or a shared server where somebody else sent spam from the same address. It is almost never the words in your message.
IMAP keeps mail on the server and syncs every device, so what you read on your phone shows as read on your laptop. POP downloads and usually deletes. Use IMAP unless you have a specific reason not to; POP is how people lose mail when a phone dies.
An alias is an extra address that delivers into an existing mailbox — info@ and bookings@ both landing in yours. Aliases are usually free; mailboxes are usually charged per person. Most small businesses need one or two mailboxes and several aliases.
You can send to a handful of people. Send to a few hundred and your provider will rate-limit you, and the complaints will damage your domain's reputation for ordinary mail too. Bulk sending belongs on a service built for it, with unsubscribe handling included.
Nothing, if email is a separate service. Everything, if it was bundled with the hosting you are leaving. Find out which you have before you give notice — recovering years of mail after the account is closed ranges from expensive to impossible.
In transit, generally yes. The weak point is almost always the password and the absence of two-factor authentication. Business email is a common target because it leads to invoices, bank details and your customer list.
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