Tools for Online Businesses

When most people get started in a new business, they use the one email that they have for everything. This can quickly become a problem as the volume of email increases, and the opportunity for spammers to get your address, your junk mail increases too.  Before you get too far into your new business, think about how you can keep your emails separate.

The easiest thing to do is create a new email address just for your new business. This way you can direct all the business email to one account, and you can keep all your personal email separate. 

There are lots of ways to get a second email address.

1. Create another mailbox with your ISP:  Most ISPs all you to have 5 to 8 mailboxes for each account that you have.  If you have not created mailboxes for everyone in your family, then create another mailbox for your business email. Details on how to do this vary by ISP, but go to their help site and search for create mailbox.
2. Use your business website: If you have a website hosted with a company, these websites usually come with some mail boxes. They usually have a web mail interface that you get to thru the cpanel interface. Most of the hosting companies have some information online about setting up and view your email.

This has a couple advantages in that the address looks like it is part of the company. So you can appear bigger than you really are.  You can forward these addresses to a personal mailbox. This is good for reading, but if you reply it goes back using your personal mail address, so be careful.

3. Get a free email account:  You can get one from yahoo, gmail, hotmail, etc. These are nice because they are free and easy to setup.  The problem with these accounts is that if you don’t use them for a while (some are 90 days), the provider may cancel the account. Then you have lost this account, and all the emails.  Now if you are doing business regularly with this account, this may not be a problem.  But if you are doing this part time, and stop, you could lose it. 

The other problem with these accounts is that some vendors that you work with may not want to setup an account with you, if you use your free email account. This is especially true for vendors that have recurring charges, or some that may want to pay you for your work.

I would use these accounts for some correspondence, but I would not use these accounts for anyone that I was doing business with that involved money. I want to make sure that I am getting my checks, or that I can use the email address to cancel a service that I no long need.

There really is no limit to the number of email mailboxes that a single person can have. The challenge becomes how to manage them.

So, think about your email mailboxes. Think about how you want to keep your business email separate from your personal emails. If you have only one mailbox now, then look into creating a new mailbox. Then you can tell folks about your new address and move your business emails to the new mailbox.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 04, 2007 at 06:54 PM. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.