Most businesses have registered at least one domain name, but some use it only for their website, and others only for email. There are several good reasons to get and use your own domain name for your email addresses. First and most important is that it gives you portability. If you’re using DSL and decide to switch to Cable or vice versa, or even if you switch from one DSL provider to another, you’ll never have to print new business cards to change your email address. Making changes to cards, letterhead and advertising can be costly, and when you email all your clients to give them the new address, there’s no guarantee that it’ll make it into their address book.

Some of our customers forward email from their AOL or other account to their address under their domain name, others forward mail from their domain name to their AOL or DSL provided account. Both of these strategies can cause mail to be lost due to anti-spam filters. AOL and Windstream (among others) have filters that can’t distinguish between real spam and forwarded spam, so they sometimes block forwarded messages that might be legitimate. Due to these problems we strongly recommend NOT forwarding mail to/from Cable or DSL mailboxes.

If you have a domain name, why wouldn’t you want your “from” address to be the same as your website address? An AOL or DSL mailbox doesn’t give you name recognition.

You should always have the aliases “info@” “support@” and “postmaster@” defined, even if they just forward to an existing mailbox. If your clients can’t remember your email address, they might try sending mail to info@yourdomain.com. Another nice feature is that if the person who answers all the info or support questions leaves, you can just forward the mail to someone else.

Note that many of these advantages also apply to personal email accounts. Depending on availability, you could register your lastname, or firstname and lastname as a “.com” address, and then use firstname@lastname.com. If you haven’t started using your domain name for email, or would like to add anti-spam filtering, please contact us at support@4w.com, or call 402-477- 8300 (or toll free 866-477-8300).

Here are the Top Five Reasons to have email under your own domain name:

• Portability
• Eliminates forwarding
• Saves money—no need to print new cards, letterhead when changing ISPs
• Name recognition
• You can use info@, support@, postmaster@ addresses.