[Leaplist] email accounts

[John Simpson]

On 2007-02-18, at 1527, Dan Cherry wrote:
>
> My wife's business ISP is changing hands and that means her email  
> address will
> change.  They've informed her that it will change again in a few  
> months, and
> that's too much hassle to notify everybody of the changes multiple  
> times.

does her company not own their own domain name? if not, they should  
get their own domain name and give each employee an email account  
within that domain. then if the ISP has to change, the email address  
itself won't need to change.

of course, the next step is for the company to build their own mail  
server. this is part of what i do for a living- contact me off-list  
if the company might be interested in hosting their own mail, and  
needs help to build and administer their mail server.

> Does anybody have any good recommendations or warnings regarding  
> any of the
> freebies out there, such as gmail, yahoo mail etc. ?

there is a negative stigma associated with free email addresses,  
especially if used for business. many people expect a "real company"  
to have their own domain name, and if they see a yahoo or hotmail  
address as a business contact, they tend to think of things like  
"cheap" or "unprofessional"... it can give the impression that  
whoever runs the company's IT department doesn't know what they're  
doing with email. basically, most of the internet has thought the  
same thing about "aol users" for years- it's like this hybrid cross  
between contempt and pity.

gmail doesn't have "as much of" the same negative stigma, because  
until recently they were "invitation only", and therefore most gmail  
users had a clue about what they were doing with computers... however  
now that they allow anybody to sign up, i can see them getting the  
same negative reputation as yahoo, hotmail, and aol, within the next  
year or two (if not sooner.)

> I want to be able to use fetchmail to collect it to a local server, so
> conventional pop3 is necessary, but large storage is not.

if you/they do go with the fetchmail scenario, make sure NOT to  
combine the entire domain's mail into one mailbox. fetchmail can  
easily be fooled into what i call "multiplicative deliveries", where  
if i send the same message to five of your domain's users, fetchmail  
sees five incoming messages and delivers each one to all five people-  
so that everybody gets five copies of the same message.

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