Email Strategies 101

posted by Allan@TechCrammer @ 11:54pm, Wednesday 29 October 2008.

It is scary, though quite true, that many people still rely on just one email address (or better put, just one email provider); not only for personal use, though even for some critical business matters.

For example, one of the companies I worked for, had been using a central email address for over 10 years that was "business_name@thelocalisp.com". Basically an email address provided by their ISP for free to them. Hundreds of clients had this saved in their address books and even automated programs from outside sources to send daily reports and other emergency alerting information. Needless to say when there were problems with this email address (and there were ocassions) it makes for a very hectic day. I remember an incident for a couple days when the "one setting fits all" spam filter employed by the ISP was misbehaving, and not letting even most legitimate email come through. Sure, there were phone calls and emails sent out (luckily could still do that) and we had informed customers to send to an alternate address or fax or verbal instructions, though not everyone knew what was going on and there were just too many issues that could have been easily mitigated.

This scenario is not just for people using their ISP's provided email service, though also for those using domain extensions such as with AOL/Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail etc... How many times have you seen a business card with those names in there? Quite a bit I am sure. I am not implying any of these service are inadequate at all; actually, just the opposite. Many large providers have superb uptime and great features. So what is it I am getting at... Well, the bottom line is owning your own personal and/or business domain.

Owning your own domain certainly appears professional, which is beneficial from an aesthetics standpoint, though functionally it also lends to the opportunity for added redundancy and even a seemless change of email providers when necessary.

This is a "101" post, so I won't get into the gritty details of DNS/MX records and best practices. Though the overall strategy here is to just acquire your own domain name, which you can host with any provider of your choosing. In a pinch, without getting overly automated, you could just go into your domain's DNS records and point your MX record to a backup provider. There could be some lag time, though when you are talking about an extended outage or a complete transfer of email accounts, this is a very easy scenario. At least much easier than contacting all of your clients to change their contact information for you.

Sure, you can enable auto-responders referring to your new address and there are some very slick contact management packages out there that will automate notification to everyone in your address book (future article?). Though really owning and operating your own domain, after you learn some of the basic concepts is certainly a best practice in many cases.

You can almost guarantee that no matter how big the provider is, how high the current uptime, or how many 9's in the SLA, they will undoubtedly have some issues from time to time. Yes, even Gmail has had issues (google it if you don't believe me!).

So, here is for not "putting all your eggs in one basket". Hmmm... or at least you can transfer your eggs to another basket more effectively, even if a couple break along the way.

I like to discuss email and will get into a "201" post in the future discussing more about DNS/MX, IMAP vs. POP3, SMTP options, clients, etc. And YES! Please backup your email just as you would any other critical file or application.

Until then...

-Allan

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