What is Email?

I expect you to be smart enough to know this! But one thing you might not know. The @ in an email is read as at, not alias! The email username@domainname.com is read as "username AT domainname DOT com".

Create Email Account Under Your New Domain Name

Most people have a Yahoo or Hotmail email account. I believe you have one too. If you have registered a domain name and have purchased a hosting account, you can now have a brand new email account under your own domain name! What I mean is, when you purchase a hosting account, email is always included! You always have the ability to create email accounts after you buy a hosting account. But the number of email accounts you can create depend on the hosting plan you selected. Some offer only 1 email account while other such as Lunar Pages offer unlimited email accounts!
If you have registered a domain name but have no intention to make a website yet, you can still purchase a hosting account just for email purposes. For example if you registered a domain name myfamily.com, you can order a hosting account just for creating email accounts. For example, you can create myself@myfamily.com, mywife@myfamily.com, mykid@myfamily.com and mydog@myfamily.com if you have trained your dog to check email. Since you don't have a website yet, people will see a blank website or "under construction" page when they log on to myfamily.com.

How Do I Send and Check My Email?

After you have created your new email accounts, there are 2 ways to manage your email. I will start with

1. Web Interface (Web-Based Email)
You can do you mailing (sending, checking, manage address book ....) directly with your web browser. You fire up your favorite web browser, say Internet Explorer and log on with your username and password and you can start mailing. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are good examples of web-based email. You can check your email everywhere in the world as long as you are connected to the internet.
The web interface is provided by your web host and they indeed look a lot different than Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. There are a few common interfaces. LunarPages is using Horde and SquirrelMail, while icons is using @Mail. Using web interface is slow because you need to continuously making connections with the mail server. Web interface also have limited features. The better way to manage your email is by using an ...

2. Email Client (Email Software)
The most popular email clients are Outlook Express and Eudora. Outlook Express is free and come with Microsoft Windows so you probably already have this in your computer. Eudora have both free and paid version. Free versions are supported by advertisement. I am a big fan of Eudora and have been using it for more than 10 years.

To do you’re mailing with your email client. You simply configure it by adding

After that, you can start you mailing immediately! The POP server and SMTP server information are provided by your web host and is always included in your welcome email. That's why your should always keep your welcome email safe and NEVER delete it!

Cut it short, your POP server (Post Office Protocol) play the role in receiving and storing your emails while SMTP server (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) in charge of sending out emails for you.

When someone send you an email, it is stored in the POP server until you retrieve it. Once you retrieve it to your email client, it will be deleted from the server. Your mail is now available in your computer. You can read it, reply to it, forward to someone else or delete it. You can also choose to keep the email on the server by configuring your email client but usually you don't need to unless you want to retrieve your emails to multiple computer (office and home; PC and laptop).

You might wonder why the word "Client" is used. If you are dining in a restaurant, you are the "client" and the waitress is your "server". The same thing happens in the internet where servers do the serving while clients are served. In the context we are discussing so far, you email client is served by the email servers, which are the POP server and SMTP server. Other examples of server client relationship is website where we have a web server and a web client, which is your web browser. If you use chatting software like ICQ , AOL, Microsoft messenger or Yahoo messenger, they are the clients and are served by their respective chat servers.

Email Forwarder (Email Alias)

Instead of creating email accounts, you can also create email forwarders with your hosting account. As the name suggest, any email received by an email forwarder will be forwarded to another email address that your have configured. So a forwarder is not really an email account because it will not store your emails and it cannot be used to send email. It just redirect any email received to another email address. It is an alias to the destination email address.

For example, you might already have a personal email account where you are using all the time. After you register a new domain, you can create a forwarder yournewemail@yournewdomain.com and configure it to forward to your original email account. This way you don't need to check your email from 2 different accounts but still be able to enjoy a new email address!

You can configure an email address to be both an email account and a forwarder. In this case, you can send mail and receive mail with this email address, while at the same time all emails received will also be forwarded to another email address.

To have more fun, you can set an email forwarder to forward to more than 1 email address! For example, if you have a forwarder sales@yourcompany.com, you can set it to forward to you, your sales manager, your sales team, and anyone who wants a copy!

Default Forward Address

What will happen if someone send an email to spiderman@yourdomain.com which you have never created? You can choose to receive it by setting a default forward address. All emails that are sent to any non existing email address under your domain name will be forwarded to this address. It is also called the catch-all address.

Auto-Responder

An auto-responder automatically replies a preset message to the sender. This is fun and I bet you have seen this happens multiple times. Have you ever sent an email to request customer support for a product or service and immediately received a reply which inform you that they have received your email and will reply to your promptly? That's an auto-responder!

Another example would be if you are away for vacation and will not be able to read your email for 1 week, you can setup an auto-responder that will automatically reply an email to anyone who send you an email while you are away, telling them you will not be able to reply to their emails from when to when. After you come back from your vacation, you can simply remove the auto-responder.

Email Expirations:

SMTP/POP3
SMTP (pronounced as separate letters) Short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a protocol for sending e-mail messages between servers. Most e-mail systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; the messages can then be retrieved with an e-mail client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server. This is why you need to specify both the POP or IMAP server and the SMTP server when you configure your e-mail application.
POP3 (1) Short for Post Office Protocol, a protocol used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Most e-mail applications (sometimes called an e-mail client) use the POP protocol, although some can use the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).
There are two versions of POP. The first, called POP2, became a standard in the mid-80's and requires SMTP to send messages. The newer version, POP3, can be used with or without SMTP.

Auto-Responder:

This is a program or script on a mail server that automatically replies to e-mails received for a certain account. Though it is run from the mail server, an auto-responder can usually be set up by the user through a Web-based interface. For example, a company might set up an auto-responder for their support e-mail address. The reply might read something like, "We have received your support request. One of our technicians will contact you shortly. “Individuals can also use auto-responders to let people know when they are away from their computer and won't be able to respond to any e-mails for awhile. For example, you might set up an auto-responder for your personal e-mail address to say, "Sorry, I am on vacation and will be returning on June 15th."