Website Email Addresses

If you've had a single email address up until now, the jump to a second email address can be a big one.

(I know this from bitter experience!)

If you need to receive business email as well as personal email, things start to get a little more complicated. For BRAINBOX customers, that typically means:

• Personal email, such as jane876@aol.com
• Emails associated with a website, such as chair@website.com

As we covered in a previous Tech Note, your personal email is:

• Delivered to a mailbox on the mailserver belonging (in most cases) to your ISP
• Collected from the mailbox by your email client (such as Microsoft Outlook)

Emails sent to chair@website.com are delivered to the website.com mailserver. But how does it get to Jane Smith?

Email Redirection

Perhaps the easiest thing to do is for the website.com mailserver to redirect incoming email to a personal mailbox.

The website.com mailserver takes very little part in the process: it just passes the email along.

Advantages:

• Simple to set up
• No changes required to the user's email client settings

Disadvantages:

• A mixing of Personal and Website email
• More possible points of failure
• Virtually impossible to test

Dedicated mailbox

Here's the approach that we much prefer:

• The email is delivered to a dedicated mailbox on the website.com mailserver
• The email is "collected" by Jane Smith

Advantages:

• Fewer potential points of failure
• We can test it!

Disadvantages:

• More difficult for the user (Jane Smith) to set up