Ten Thoughts on Creating a Website: 6. Email Options

Email consists of three parts:

1. Your email address (info@mycoolsite.com)

2. Your email client (Yahoo or Outlook)

3. Your email configuration

An email account that is associated with your website (info@mycoolsite.com) can be anything you like (screaming_monkey@mycoolsite.com). It is created and configured using your website’s hosting control panel. You may also have a free account that came with your internet service (me@cablecompanyname.com) or a free account online (me@hotmail.com) or an account through work or school (me@workorschoolname.com).

Your email client is the software you use to read, write, and manage your email messages. There are desktop email programs such as Microsoft’s Outlook of Apple ’s Mail and there are web-based services such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. AOL has both a desktop program and a web-based service (both of which are horrid … but I digress).

Your email configuration is the instructions for what the name of your account is, where it lives, and how you access it. For my clients, I recommend Gmail. Gmail is a free, web-based service offered by Google. Google has many of the smartest people on earth working for them, they run huge data centers, and they are a billion dollar company. I’d say they are reliable! Unlike Hotmail, Yahoo, and others, Gmail allows you to access a wide variety of accounts from within their system and when you respond, the response stamp comes from the account to which the email was sent. Wait, what’s that mean?! It means that I have ame@thisthingy.com and ame@whatchamacallit.com and ame@whosit.com but I only ever log in to one account, my Gmail one. When someone emails me at ame@whosit.com, they get a response from ame@whosit.com. Cool!

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