Moving from Free eMail to Professional eMail
Does it bother you to see professional businesses contacting you from name@MSN.com or from title@Live.com? Don’t you have more confidence in someone who writes you from attorney@LawFirm.com or associate@CateringCo.com?
We at Maverick Solutions wholeheartedly encourage all businesspeople to use their own companies’ domains for their email addresses rather than use free email services, as it looks much more professional and business-like. Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail addresses are fine for private individuals, but just as you use letterhead when you’re communicating by snail-mail on behalf of your company, you should also use an email address on the business’ domain when communicating electronically.
This need not be a terribly challenging nor expensive endeavor. Depending on your needs, it might not even cost you anything. Here are the most common four options from which people can choose:
- If you already have a hosted domain (such as one for your Website), that’s the first option to consider. Most Web hosting companies include free email hosting in their package, so choosing that option incurs no additional recurring costs and easily lets you use the same domain name for your Website and your email. We host this type of service for many of our clients – it’s inexpensive and relatively easy to configure. If you can follow directions, and if you can get free setup support from your hosting company, you may be able to do this all by yourself, for free.
- If you don’t have a Website or if your hosting company doesn’t offer free email, there are plenty of hosting companies that sell you cheap email-only hosting – probably in the range of $5-$10/month, or Web and email hosting for $10-$20/month, depending on features. If you want to compare, we offer a package of up to five mailboxes of email-only hosting for $8/month, or our cheapest Website and email hosting package includes up to 10 mailboxes for $12/month.
- A third option to consider is that many free email services offer an upgraded version to enable you to use your own domain name. Yahoo Mail Plus, for example, offered this service for $20/year, when last I checked. Just be sure that you’ll be able to both send and receive emails using your own domain name, else you might end up using a free email address to respond to emails sent to your business’ domain address.
- If you want the most features, though, the best choice is probably a hosted Exchange-based email service. It’s what we at Maverick Solutions use, in-house, for our email. Instead of just any old email server at the back end, a Microsoft Exchange Server offers synchronization of email, contacts, calendar, and to-do list. This is terrific if you work on multiple devices, such as desktop computers at home & office, cell phone, tablet computers, or shared “kiosk” or “café” computers. Using an Exchange-based email host, if you delete a message, send an email reply, move a message to a folder, add a cell number to a contact list entry, schedule an appointment, or check off an item on your to-do list, for example, those changes will automatically be synchronized across all of your devices. A bunch of companies offer this level of hosting at various price levels. For service and reliability, we recommend Microsoft’s own Outlook 365 service for hosting. It’s $3.50/month per address for email-only hosting. It’s a bit technical for a layman to set up, though, especially if you’ll be hosting a Webpage at the same domain name through a different hosting company. The process, also, frequently takes multiple steps over 3-4 days to complete, but if you need our help, we can do a lot of it remotely, to keep your costs down.
Naturally, if you need more help implementing this transition for yourself or your business, Maverick Solutions would be happy to be of assistance; call or email for a no-cost consultation.
