Email accounts

In most cases, we will host your email accounts as well as your website. If however, your email accounts are handled externally (e.g. your own Exchange Server), the instructions in this section will not be applicable.

What is an email account?

An email account is some space on our servers to which email is delivered. An email address (such as yourname@yourbusiness.com) simply identifies an email account.

Think of it this way – your telephone number is how people get through to your telephone. You can a new number (just like you can get a new email address) or make them forward to different telephones. With this analogy, you can see that it will be possible to have multiple email addresses for one email account. For example, info@yourbusiness.com and bob@yourbusiness.com can all go through to the one email account (i.e. one is an alias to the other).

Your email account holds all incoming emails until they are accessed or collected.

Email software

Just like you use a web browser to surf the Internet, you would use an email software to access your email account. Once accessed, you can download your emails to your computer, read them and send new emails via your email account. Examples of email software include Outlook and Apple Mail.

Before such software can be used to access your email account, there are some settings that need to be configured.

Multiple email accounts

You may want to have more than just one email account – e.g. for each person in your clinic. Although it is possible to set up one computer to access multiple email accounts, remember that it can cause confusion in setting up and daily usage – especially if you are not accustomed to regularly working with email.

For this reason, we generally suggest that you set up each computer with one email account only.

Sharing your email account

To keep things simple, you may opt to have only one email account for your clinic, such as the info@yourbusiness.com account – your reception computer can be set up to access this account.

Accessing your email account from multiple computers

There may be times when you need to access your email account from another computer (e.g. you usually use your reception computer to access info@yourbusiness.com, but want to access it from home occasionally).

One thing to remember is that although you can configure more than one computer (using the same settings) to access the email account from multiple locations, without proper preparation you can get unexpected results.

When email arrives in your account, it is held there until your email software (e.g. Outlook) downloads it to your computer. Once downloaded, it is usually deleted from the server. This means that having multiple computers accessing the one email account introduces the problem of only one computer being able to download any new email and other computers not ever seeing it (since it has been deleted from the server).

So how do you share email accounts or access email from other places?

Good question. Essentially, this is possible by keeping your emails on the server, and not downloading them permanently. Hence each time you want to access an old email, it is downloaded afresh from the server (as opposed to being downloaded once and then removed from the server).

This is a good option, but remember that your email account storage size is 1GB – so you will need to periodically delete old emails and empty your deleted emails folder, to ensure you don’t run out of space. Also remember that keeping your emails on the server means that if you cancel your service with us, you will no longer be able to access these emails (unless you back them up yourself first).

You have 2 choices:

1) Webmail

Webmail is a browser based interface to your email accounts. Just like Hotmail and Gmail, our Webmail system can be accessed using your web browser. Read more about webmail here.

2) Use IMAP account type instead of POP

Don’t worry what these mean. Think of IMAP as the option where you want all your emails to be stored wholly online, whereas POP is the option where you want your email software to download and manage all your emails from your computer alone.

To use this option, simply choose “IMAP” account type, instead of “POP” account type. You will need to make this decision when configuring your email software.