Managing Your Email

Email management is not "one size fits all". Make the right decisions so that your email setup will best meet your business's needs: eg add new email accounts, delete unwanted accounts or increase a mailbox's size.

Below are some pointers on no of accounts, controlling mailbox clutter, email forwarding, and when to use email aliases.

Our service

We aim to provide high quality, secure & private email hosting along with consistent support & advice, tailored to our clientele. If you only want lowest prices, you'll need to go elsewhere for your email hosting! (You can still host your website & renew domain names through SuttonNet.)

We charge per mailbox, withunit costs depending on total storage & other facilities.

• User pays - you take $ responsibility for your business choices & the benefits you receive, via service level & no of accounts.
• Our email hosting is a reseller service; they charge us in the same way. So do most of the business email hosting specialists that we've encountered.

Making changes

SuttonNet sets up your new email accounts and the all-important DNS settings. We also delete accounts or change your email hosting plans, on request.

• It's more secure for all our clients, because we don't readily give out access to the server interface.
  
• It's safer - you can't accidentally change important hosting settings.
• DMARC & other email DNS settings are complex, & are better left to hosting experts.
  

In the webmail interface, you can change email password or adjust the spam filter. We recommend that you change the password there, as soon as your email account is set up. Don't forget that you'll need to change it on your phone, computer etc too.

How many accounts?

Your goal is to choose the accounts that you really need to manage your business well - without unnecessary costs, and to simplify email management as far as practicable. It's the same decisionmaking process that you go through for other business services or purchases. Just as with any purchase, you need to do some research & understand what you are getting for your $.

First step to reduce costs is to cancel email addresses that you don't need. Eg are you still hanging onto email addresses of staff who left long ago?

Some online experts advise against deleting old mail accounts. With generic mail services such as Yahoo, Gmail etc, someone might re-register your old email address & receive emails intended for you. But this is not a problem for your own-domain email accounts.

To do this: first ask us to redirect all mail from the old account to a current email address. Go through the emails carefully, checking who uses that address to contact your organisation. After some months, you'll have updated contact details for the genuine correspondents and you can ask us to delete the account from the mailserver. Then [save historic emails to archives as needed and] delete the unwanted account from your PC, phone etc.

Watch out for contact email addresses used for accounts & memberships that only renew at one-year, two-year or longer intervals: eg domain name renewals.

If you discover that you've accidentally deleted an essential email account for an online account: don't panic. Just ring or email us. We can quickly re-create the account for you, or add the address to another email account as a temporary alias.

Keep close watch on accounts & storage needs

Always use general email address(es) as the main contact point(s) for outsiders. Don't rely on addresses like joe@yourdomain; if Joe leaves or his role changes, you could be in strife.

If you run an IMAP account, your server mailbox must hold all draft, sent & stored emails & addressee contact lists, as well as most recently arrived mail. IMAP accounts for busy email addresses naturally need lots of serverside storage.

Do you need bigger serverside mailbox storage than our pricelist shows? Or need more than 4 email accounts? Ask us for a quote.

Storing emails on the mail server

IMAP has some very useful features, but you rely on storage on someone else's computer. (A mail server is basically a computer). No matter where you host your IMAP email accounts, you pay for that 3rd party storage in some fashion. Either:

• you simply pay for how many GB you might need; or
  
• storage is 'free', but the provider MUST be making $ out of you somehow. That's likely to be by ads &/or data harvesting. Eg robots may scan your email content & then target you with 'appropriate' ads.

It's up to you to manage this in the best way for your organisation. Upfront price is not the only consideration.

• We recommend that you avoid email hosting that uses ads, if you can. That way, you & your staff avoid accidentally clicking on ads that might link to an infected website, or some other scam.
  
• Keep server mailboxes trim to keep down your costs; archive or delete emails that you don't need at your fingertips.
• If your IMAP email account still grows like topsy, be prepared to pay for a larger mailbox as the years go by.
• Consider POP accounts for email addresses that are only accessed on one device. Serverside storage can be kept minimal.
  

If the server mailbox fills up

A full mailbox can't receive new emails. If you receive a 'mailbox is 80/90/95% full' warning email, act fast to free up serverside storage.

Forwarding

You can forward email from your @mydomain email account to any other email account, such as Gmail. Some clients prefer to stick with the mail software they know, rather than learn another system for own-domain email.

There are downsides to automatic mail forwarding:

• you usually can't send emails 'from' the original email address. This looks unprofessional and it confuses customers;
  
• important emails can be overlooked amongst the many;
• essential mail security protection like DMARC can be difficult to set up;
• if certain spam gets forwarded, the forwarding mail server will get blacklisted, rather than the original sender. This will block other users' email too - such as SuttonNet's own emails. It can be difficult and time-consuming to get a mailserver off blacklists. So if your email account is still hosted on SuttonNet's own server: we do NOT permit email forwarding to other email hosts at all!

Aliases

With aliasing, one email account has several names: eg deidre@herdomain.com.au as an alias of deirdre@herdomain.com.au.

Aliases can only be set up within the same domain (ie the email address looks exactly the same after the @ sign).

This is useful if you don't get much email on some email addresses, but you still need them. Aliases mean fewer email accounts to manage and lower hosting costs. We don't charge a fee for aliases.

Don't use aliases for addresses that get lots of emails though. The account mailbox will quickly fill up.

Need an alias (or two or three)?

Last updated 11 September 2022