Domain Email Options, Instructions and Tips

Your hosting account with OK Correll Business Solutions includes up to 20 domain email addresses. (Additional addresses are available at a slight additional charge.) Using domain email addresses in your advertising and printed materials as well as on your web site makes you look more professional than using your hotmail, yahoo, gmail or other domain email accounts.

If I had 3 employees and myself at OK Correll Business Solutions, I might wish to have 4 email addresses:

jim@okcorrell.com

tom@okcorrell.com

nancy@okcorrell.com

susan@okcorrell.com

I also might want to have a few generic email address:

sales@okcorrell.com

info@okcorrell.com

The above would be a total of 6 domain email addresses.

There are several options available to you in using your domain email addresses. We'll present them here from easy to complicated, along with the pros and cons of each so you can make an informed decision about which is best for you.

Option 1

Option 1 involves setting up a forwarding function from each of your domain email addresses to an existing email address the user already has set up. The existing email addresses many times go to email service providers you are familiar with like yahoo, gmail, etc.

On your web hosting agreement, beside each domain email address we want to create, we list an existing email address to which the domain email address can be forwarded. From the example above, the list might look like this

jim@okcorrell.com	jim@yahoo.com
tom@okcorrell.com	tom@yahoo.com
nancy@okcorrell.com	nancy@yahoo.com
susan@okcorrell.com	susan@yahoo.com
sales@okcorrell.com	jim@yahoo.com
info@okcorrell.com	nancy@yahoo.com, susan@yahoo.com

Notice we can forward a generic email address to more than one person. Also note that if you have many forms in your web site where people can submit questions, using a generic address like "info@" means you can choose who receives the inquiries. If you have a change in personnel or job duties, you just have one place to go set up forwarding of "info@" to a different person rather than having to into each form on your site and changing the "submit to" email address.

Pros and Cons of Option 1

Pros	Cons
Easy to set up and requires no changes to your current email account.	When you send new email, it does not show your domain email address as the return email address. This may cause some confusion with your customers.
Your domain mail automatically comes to your normal "Inbox" where you can read it without having to go into another application.	Your domain email will be mixed in with whatever other mail you receive at the forwarding address.

Option 2

Everything rolls along fine after Option 1 until you call us one day, saying: "OK, we have our domain addresses printed on our materials and web site. That makes us look nice more professional than having our "yahoo" email addresses on everything. When we send email, however, it shows as coming from our "yahool" accounts rather than coming from our domain email accounts. How do we make our domain email accounts show up as "From" when we send email?

The simplest way to have email show as coming from your domain email address is to use the "Smartmail" web mail application that is include with your hosting package. In Option 2, we switch you completely away from using a forwarding email address as with option 1.

Pros and Cons of Option 2

Pros	Cons
Requires no changes to your current email account. Email just simply quits coming to it.	If you want to look at your personal mail and your business mail, you have to log onto both systems.
Emails sent to your customers will show your domain email address as the return email address.
You can check your domain email from any Internet computer without any email software. No additional set up charges.	Depending on your Internet connection speed, you may perceive a slightly slower pace with the "Smartmail" than with something like "Outlook".
The "Smartmail" interface has the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook. Your domain email will not be mixed in with any other mail you receive or send.

Option 3

Option 3 is for use in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook. With option 3, we set up an email account in the Outlook program. Similar to the forwarding of Option 1, this option allows you to send email using your domain email address as return address directly from your Outlook application (You have to remember to set the "send from" account to your domain account.) Anyone familiar with email accounts in Microsoft Outlook can set up an account to use for your domain email. If you don't have anyone like that available, we'll be happy to set it up for you for $50.00 per account. If there are several accounts to set up on multiple computers, we can quote an hourly rate that would be more economical for you. We can either come to your location or dial into your computer remotely.

Pros and Cons of Option 3

Pros	Cons
Emails sent to your customers will show your domain email address as the return email address.	Requires the addition of a new email account to your current MS Outlook application. $50.00 set up fee if we create and configure this account for you.
You can check both personal and business email from the Outlook application with which you are now familiar.	Your domain email be mixed in with any other mail you receive or send.