2 Minute Web Tips: Get your email address right

You must get your email address right because it affects so many aspects of your business success.

And if you get it wrong, you could get blacklisted as a SPAMMER !

It’s a conversation that I have regularly with clients, and it came up again this week, so here are some quick tips . . .

4743334265 14878b27b7 m1 Get your email address right

email address (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

The first, and probably the most important, aspect of setting up any business email address is to follow this simple rule:

Use an email address at your domain name and not at your ISP or a 3rd party email provider.

If for no other reason than it makes your business look professional.

The easiest way to show this is by example:

GOOD for business

philip@hotpinkwebsites.com.au

sales@hotpinkwebsites.com.au

BAD for business

philip@gmail.com

philip@hotmail.com

philip@bigpond.com

philip@optusnet.com.au

Getting the idea?

The next big mistake people make is not setting up their email program to receive their business email address.

It seems much easier to just forward your business emails to your personal email address that is already set up in your email program (MS Outlook, Mac Mail, etc) or your gmail account.

But this can actually get you blacklisted as a SPAMMER !

How does that happen?

email servers will check for emails that are automatically forwarded from another email address because this is one of the tactics that spammers use to conceal their activities.

Here is what one of our techs wrote to a client this week when we were asked to check why her emails were getting bounced.

We do not recommend forwarders to outside email addresses as this many times only results in spam being forwarded to another server.

The recipient server sees the forwarded spam as coming from your own hosting account/server which is the reason why we do not recommend the forwarders in that particular case.

A better solution we have found, is to create individual email boxes for the email addresses you need.

You then setup these email accounts as external/POP3 accounts within most mail applications such as Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, or Mail.app within Mac OSX.

This will cause the recipient email to connect to the server to retrieve mail rather than being forwarded.

Any spam emails received will not be classified as coming from your domain in this case.

It is OK to auto-forward an email within a domain.

So . . .