Email Hosting Discussions

Greatmail LLC offers free basic email hosting for non-profit organizations and qualifying small businesses. In order to be eligible for free email hosting, non-profit organizations must meet the following three requirements: 1) Must have a registered top level domain, 2) Must have a functional web site, and 3) Must post a Greatmail technology partner link at the bottom of organization's home page or other approved page.

Small businesses may also qualify for free email hosting by activating a basic web hosting plan with Greatmail. Web hosting plans start at $8.33 per month and include free email with antispam and virus protection, firewall security, POP3 and IMAP support, SMTP authentication and webmail. By placing a technology partner link at the bottom of the company's home page, small businesses may also qualify for discounted web hosting rates.

Both non-profit organizations and small businesses may choose to upgrade to Greatmail's premium email hosting service including advanced collaboration tools, increased storage and hosted Exchange.

For more information about getting free email hosting, please complete our non-profit and small business contact form.

Do you have questions about your company's email and want guidance in selecting and/or maintaining an email solution for your business? If so, you may want to consider hiring an email consultant to analyze your company's email requirements and recommend email services.

What is email consulting, and what sets it apart from services offered by general information technology (IT) consultants? Email consulting focuses specifically on email including email servers and software, email hosting, email outsourcing and email marketing. This article will look at common issues email consultants address and touch on the solutions you may want to consider for your business.

One of the most fundamental issues email consultants address is how to host your company's email. Specifically, do you host your email in-house or outsource it to an email hosting provider? An email consultant will guide you through the pros and cons of each direction and help you make the best decision for your organization.

In recent years, outsourced solutions have gained popularity, especially with small businesses. However, there are compelling reasons, for medium and large sized businesses in particular, to maintain in-house email servers. It is even possible to outsource portions of the in-house operation, namely the antivirus and spam filtering to third party providers and still keep your email servers on site.

Trying to decide between POP3, IMAP or Exchange? If you're expecting feature rich components like calendar sharing, global address list and seamless synchronizations between desktop and mobile devices, Microsoft Exchange is the way to go.

On the other hand, if you're on a budget and still want advanced functionalities, your email consultant may be able to recommend IMAP and POP3 configurations with third party plug-ins that emulate Exchange-like features.

Do you need archiving? From basic BCC archiving to HIPAA compliant email archiving, email consultants can help you find the right archiving service for your business and meet any compliance requirements for data retention and discovery. Most hosted solutions have built-in archiving services available at an additional cost per mailbox. There are also third party archiving firms that specialize in off site archiving.

You may also have questions about email marketing, newsletters, automatic notifications, alerts and other high volume applications. Your email consultant can help you identify what types of messages can be sent using your regular email accounts and when to use a separate service for bulk email. You will also want to understand how to properly implement CAN-SPAM compliant email for your bulk messages.

It is important to understand that most email hosting companies and ISPs have limits on how many outbound messages can be sent at one time. In addition, meeting deliverability expectations often requires using specialzed SMTP services optimized for high volume outbound sending.

Depending on your monthly volume of bulk messages, you may be able to host your own application in house. You may want to combine your in-house solution with a third party SMTP service for improved deliverability rates. For example, a bulk email hosting plan will let you send high volume email using your in-house application or a third party newsletter application like Interspire's Email Marketer. There are also 100% outsourced solutions available from companies like MailChimp and ConstantContact. If you are on a tight budget, MailChimp offers a free but limited bulk email plan for getting started.

There is no one size fits all solution for email. The role of your email consultant is to identify the type of solutions that will work for your group and develop a plan of action that meets both your budget and communication requirements.

Greatmail LLC provides email consulting services for both internal hosting clients and outside customers. Let us know how we can help you navigate the email marketplace.

Labels: bulk_email_hosting, email_consulting, email_hosting, email_marketing, exchange_hosting

As social networking sites gain momentum, the question arises how to integrate content and information from sites like Twitter into popular client side communication tools like Microsoft Outlook.

Fortunately, with third party Outlook add-in applications like TwInbox (formerly known as OutTwit) available from TechHit, Outlook can become a full featured Twitter client.

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, here's a quick summary of the social networking tool. Like a mini-blog, Twitter lets you post short and relatively real time updates that are viewable by your fellow peers or "followers" on Twitter. The process of finding followers is another discussion, but in short, Twitter lets you say things to other people who want to hear what you're doing.

Unlike email, your "tweets" or posts are not sent from mailbox to mailbox. Rather, they are posted to a database similar to posts in an online forum, bulletin board or a blog. Twitter has the potential to transfer general information like updates or notifications more effectively than email.

Take for example the online merchant who wants to notify a customer base of an online coupon code. Instead of sending out thousands of email notifications, a large percentage of which would probably be lost to spam filtering, a single tweet from the merchant is instantly heard by anyone who is logged into Twitter and following the store.

But what if I am not logged in to Twitter, how do I know about the coupon code? Twitter has a built in preference to notify you of tweets by email. But this defeats the purpose of a real time posting tool, kind of like printing up hard copies of all your email messages. Provided you use Outlook, TwInbox elegantly solves the problem of getting the information from Twitter to you and posts it in your mail client much like an RSS feed.

But TwInbox isn't a read-only tool. It handily lets you use Outlook's Reply and Reply to All buttons to send out Twitter direct messages and @replies. If you're an Outlook user looking to speed up your Twitter communications, TwInbox will be a huge timesaver. Check out TwInbox online.

Labels: twinbox, twitter, using_twitter_in_outlook

You've recently moved your email to an email hosting provider. The incoming spam is finally under control and your users have all transitioned to the new server without issue. Then you get the call from your new email provider. A recent message you tried to send to 350 recipients was blocked.

Like it or not, some of your outbound email may be considered bulk. It's a necessary measure to keep email flowing between servers. In short, sending bulk mail and regular email on the same IP addresses is a bad idea as it can slow down the deliverability of your regular email correspondence.

So how do you deal with sending bulk mail? It depends on a few factors: 1) Volume, 2) Frequency, and 3) Message Type. Volume is simply the number of messages you send typically on a monthly level. What is the frequency for your bulk emailings? Daily, weekly, monthly?

Lastly, what kind of messages are you sending? Are you relaying newsletters or automatic email notifications? Are your messages solicited or unsolicited? In either case, do your messages include opt-in and opt-out functionality and do they adhere to the guidelines of the CAN-SPAM Act?

Closely related to message type is the issue of messsage generation. Are your messages generated automatically by an application server? On the other hand, are your mailings portable and can they be facilitated through an email marketing provider like Constant Contact?

Email marketing companies provide turnkey bulk email management services. Pricing is generally based on either the number of recipients who actually receive your messages or the total number of messages relayed monthly. Depending on the size of your address list, a turnkey solution may provide a practical, cost-effective solution for sending out newsletter type lists.

However, if you're substantially invested in your own custom email application and database, you may be better off looking at a bulk email hosting service. As opposed to a turnkey provider, a bulk email host will provide hosting for mailboxes specifically designed to send/receive bulk messages and let you use your existing system to maintain your lists and messages.

For small distributions, entry level pricing for reliable bulk email hosting may be substantially higher than that of the turnkey providers. However, having both the flexibility to work with your existing system and the scalability to significantly grow your list outweighs the premium pricing for many clients.

Greatmail provides a range of email hosting services for both regular and bulk type messages. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

Labels: bulk_email, bulk_email_hosting, can-spam, dedicated_email_servers, email_marketing, smtp_hosting

Clients often ask about BES and synchronization of calendars and contacts between Outlook and Blackberry. One of the major issues is specifically how to synchronize calendars and contacts data between the desktop and wireless device.

There are presently 2 ways to utilize the Blackberry. The first and more traditional method is via your POP3/IMAP mailbox. Depending on your device and service provider, you set up this connection directly on your Blackberry or through a web based panel hosted by your wireless carrier.

The POP3/IMAP method is very similar to Outlook. When you download messages, you have the option to delete messages from the handheld or from the handheld and the server.

By default, connecting via your IMAP/POP3 user name and password does not provide a means of synchronizing the wireless device calendars and contacts with the data in Outlook. However, this can be accomplished using a sync tool in Outlook and similar tool on the Blackberry that reconciles data from both locations through PIM data the email server.

The second and more advanced method of connecting to the Blackberry is with BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server). BES provides a comprehensive built-in synchronization solution for messages, calendars and contacts between the wireless device and Outlook.

In order to sync, BES requires Microsoft Exchange server and only works with hosted Exchange mailboxes, not POP3/IMAP accounts.

BES/Exchange provides a nearly transparent end user experience. BES is built to sync and doesn't require any special installation of tools or plug-ins to work properly. However, functionality comes at a price. Licensing fees for BES/Exchange are considerably more expensive than standard POP3/IMAP accounts.

Labels: bes, blackberry

What is a spambot? Spambots are address harvesting robots that scrape the internet looking for email addresses to build mailing lists. Common places for spambots to collect email addresses include forums, guestbooks, blogs, contact forms and other web pages that contain or display email addresses.

There are several things you can do to protect your email address from harvesting robots. The best practice is to carefully guard your email address. If you are registering for a service, shopping online, or posting a message on a forum, consider using a secondary or even a disposable email address.

Another vulnerability is web site contact forms and HTML links that utilize the HTML mailto function. While the mailto function provides a fast and easy means of enabling email communication from your web site, it also exposes your email address in the page's HTML leaving the address wide open for harvesting spambots.

Web developers have come up with several methods to improve the security of the mailto function. For example, one method called address munging breaks an address into character strings that can be decoded by the browser using client side javascript. However, more advanced spambots can actually decode email addresses that have been munged.

Ultimately, the best defense for web site contact forms is to use a PHP or ASP script that processes message handling on the server side. For more information on server side scripts that enable secure contact form processing, please visit the link below.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=secure+contact+forms

Labels: contact_forms, email_security, spambots

Ever received a spam message supposedly from yourself or another existing or non-existing account at your domain? If so, you've experienced email spoofing where messages are forged or made to appear as though they originate from your server. If you're the email administrator for your domain, you certainly know the frustration trying to explain to your clients that these messages do not actually originate from your server.

Another unwanted consequence of email spoofing occurs when spammers forge your email address as the sending or reply-to address in their spam messages. When these messages cannot be delivered to invalid mailboxes, your address receives hundreds or thousands of bounce messages.

How do you prevent email spoofing? Unfortunately, standard SMTP alone does not prevent this type of spam. In short, anyone can specify any email address in the return path header. However, implementing a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) can prevent SMTP forgeries and mitigate the undesireable effects of email spoofing.

What is SPF? Sender Policy Framework allows domain owners to specify valid sending servers in the DNS zone records for a domain. How does SPF work? Like a reverse lookup for email, SPF lets receiving servers verify that sending servers are in fact authorized to send mail for specific domains. In practice, when a message is received from someone@somedomain.com, the receiving server looks up the SPF entry in the DNS for somedomain.com. If the sending server matches the server specified in the SPF entry, then the message is accepted by the receiving server.

For more information on generating an SPF entry for your domain, check out:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/

Labels: email_spoofing, sender_policy_framework, spf