Domain email

Hands up anyone who has seen a web site in a newspaper or magazine advert followed by the email address @aol.com or myisp.com instead of the site’s domain.

Just about everyone, I’ll wager. I, for example, recently received an advertising insert with a local weekly newspaper and counted eight companies who haven’t heard of email forwarding. So let’s sort this one out once and for all.

Imagine we’ve bought the domain name examplecompany.com and we access the internet via Internet Service Provider (ISP) Tiscali. We’re building our site and adding in the all important email contact addresses. Now, instead of using josephsoap@tiscali.co.uk, wouldn’t it be much more professional and brand-building to use info@examplecompany.co.uk?

All domain names providers let you set up email forwarding, usually via an online control panel with which you will have been issued a user name and password to log on. What email forwarding does is let you create a path for email landing on your domain name to be automatically redirected to your inbox. In this example, info@examplecompany.co.uk  would go straight to the email account josephsoap@tiscali.co.uk. Depending on where you purchase your domain name, you will be allowed to create 20 or more email forwarding addresses.

This is useful as it will allow you to filter and prioritise email when it arrives in your inbox. For instance, you could set up info@examplecompany.co.uk  for general enquiries and sales@examplecompany.co.uk for sales related email that you may wish to deal with ahead of general enquiries. By using different email addresses, you will also gain another indicator as to which pages visitors are accessing on your site.

As well as setting up a range of email forwarding addresses for specific tasks or people within your company, your domain name control panel enables you to set a catchall or default email forwarding address. This means that if someone spells a name wrong or just takes a stab at contacting someone at your domain, the email won’t be bounced back to them. Instead the dodgily addressed email to bigcheese@examplecompany.co.uk will be redirected to the catchall or default email address, josephsoap@tiscali.co.uk.

The beauty of email forwarding is that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to set it up. And it allows you to keep on message in terms of your brand building around your domain name. Using your ISP’s email account just muddies the water, especially if, at some time in the future, you choose to move to another service provider.

So, that’s email forwarding sussed. Next time we’ll look at how you can send from your domain as well as receive.

Meantime, since we’re in receive mode, here’s how to fill in the Subject fields of email sent from your site. This is good for email filtering purposes too.

When you create an email link on a web page, the HTML code looks like something like this: mailto:info@examplecompany.co.uk  But by adding to the code we can pre-set the Subject field of the new email created when the link is clicked. Since info@examplecompany.co.uk is for general enquiries, the email link within the page to fill the Subject field would be mailto:info@examplecompany.co.uk?subject=Enquiry  (Click it and see)
Now, you probably don’t want all this email to aggregate into your inbox in one difficult to handle lump. To marshal your messages most effectively, it’s best to set up folders within your inbox. One folder for info and another for sales will, along with the appropriate message rules, help you tell at a glance the make up of your newly arrived email.

See the link below for details of how to set up message rules. In a nutshell the criteria for filtering is for email addressed to: info@examplecompany.co.uk to be moved to the specified folder, in this case, the folder you created for info.

To recap then, email forwarding not only makes your offline advertising more professional and focussed on your domain name, it helps make life easier when popping your inbox too.

* Re. the catchall email address, it should be pointed out that spammers send their junk mail using randomly generated names. A catchall will almost inevitably lead to some extra spam, but this has to be offset against the possibility of genuine email being bounced back to the sender.