Starting a New Business Series – Part 4
Hello fellow entrepreneurs!
Last week I wrote about how to easily launch your own website. This week I’ll be giving you some tips on how to get setup with your own email address based on your custom domain. Email is a complicated topic, but one of the most important communication tools in your business. If your emails aren’t being reliably delivered, and instead are ending up in your clients spam folder, there’s no telling how many sales you could miss out on. Not to mention irritated clients who aren’t receiving answers to their emails.
Why is email a complicated topic you ask? It’s all about reputation! When you send an email, it doesn’t just go straight into the recipients inbox. It has to run through a gauntlet of scanners. Some check for virus’, some check if your email is spam, some check whether your email comes from a reputable server, some check whether all the records for your mail server exist and are correct, and more. You get the idea. These filters have gotten more and more rigorous as time has passed, which means it takes considerable effort to maintain a good mail server reputation.
The good news is that most major email services manage this for you, so you never have to. However, if you choose a cheap email service that doesn’t actively manage their reputation, the kind that spammers take advantage of, you will have rough times ahead. Any money you save will be spent putting out fires. Who needs that kind of stress in their lives?
While there are many email providers to choose from, three of the top ones I would recommend are:
- Amazon WorkMail via AWS
- Microsoft365 via outlook.com
- Gmail via Google Workspace Business
If you registered your custom domain with Amazon Route53, and are running your web server on Amazon Lightsail or EC2, then it would make sense to keep your services all with the same provider and use Amazon Workmail. Firstly, it’s very affordable. It will cost you $4USD per user per month (addresses and alias’ are free). It offers a full Microsoft Exchange server that manages all your emails, calendars and contacts, and will work with all your devices (desktops, laptops, mobile devices, etc) across all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac). Amazon has a very strict policy against spam and actively terminates spammer accounts to preserve the reputation of their services. This means most or all of your emails will safely get to their destination.
What did I mean by addresses and alias’ are free? A single user could have multiple email accounts and multiple alias’. For example, if you have an email like: name@company.com
you could have as many alias’ as you like pointing to that email. For example, sales@company.com could be an alias that points to name@company.com. The sales address is like a virtual address that just funnels mail into your main account. Kind of like a desktop shortcut on your desktop isn’t a copy of the program but points to the program. Often companies use alias’ to create role specific email addresses. For example, everybody in an organization may have their own email address with their name, which is what they check in their mail client:
Then you can create alias’ for each role like sales, accounting, engineering, shipping etc. That way if an employee leaves, you can simply redirect an alias to yourself or another employee without any disruption to clients. Similarly, each user account on Amazon WorkMail can have multiple email addresses it receives mail for. These are not alias’ and can’t be redirected, since they belong to one person. So in the end you just pay for an account for each physical person, not the number of email addresses and alias’ they may have. Of course each service may handle this differently, so please make sure you understand their billing policy before signing up.
In the end, whichever service you decide to use, it should take care of all these details for you, so you don’t have to. You can just move on with your life and simply use the service. Focus on your strengths, which presumably aren’t centered around managing mail servers!
As always, I want to leave you with some words of encouragement.
All of these online services and technical tasks can be overwhelming when you first start a business. Rest assured, once you have them all setup, this too shall pass. You can then simply focus on growing your business, which is tough enough without tangling with all these crazy IT tasks. If you’re able, take advantage of a professional IT person familiar with the services you need, and focus your efforts elsewhere. Pick your battles (and your email services) wisely!
Please don’t forget to visit my website and subscribe to get my weekly blog in your inbox. Hopefully it doesn’t go into your spam folder!
Until next time,
Ernst Bergen
B.Sc. Mech. Eng.