Information on setting up email services and an explanation of the processes involved.

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Email and Email Service Set-up

You are probably already using email so we won’t go into much detail on this. The chances are that you are using a free email service from Google, Hotmail, Yahoo or one of the many other email providers. When you have your own hosting space it should also offer business email accounts with your own domain name, for example sales@yourcompany.com. This gives your email (and your business) a much more professional appearance.

How Email works

We all use email without really considering how it works. Most people are happy to log on to Email setup their email account and send and receive email without giving it a thought. We don’t have to know about the processes involved but if you aim to have your own business email it will help if you have a basic understanding of how your email gets to your inbox. A non technical explanation follows.

With your free email account you log on to the appropriate provider’s (Google, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc) email server to check your email. This is done with a user ID and password. When someone sends you an email it gets directed through the Domain Name System (or DNS). What the DNS does is to look at the domain names that it has in its index to find out where this domain is actually located on the Internet.

Domain names are actually numbers but to make it easier for people to remember them they are given names. The numbers are called IP addresses. They use a numbering system called dotted decimal notation, which looks like this, 66.230.200.100. Without going into the mathematics of this system it is sufficient to say that it provides a total of 4,294,967,296 possible IP addresses. The Domain Name System resolves the domain names to the proper IP address.

If you have a Hotmail account and I send you an email the DNS will figure out where your email should be delivered to and send it there. Once there it will sit on the Hotmail server until you collect it by logging on to your account.

If you use a proper "Email client" like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express you can configure this to check for email at predefined intervals and deliver it to a folder on your PC.

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