Where Your Email Should Live

The default nobody chooses

Hosting plans include mailboxes. Setting one up during signup takes a minute and costs nothing extra, so almost everybody does it.

It is a reasonable place to start and it creates a dependency most businesses do not notice until it matters.

Your website and your correspondence now live in the same account, with the same company, on the same machine, tied to the same renewal.

Why the dependency matters

Three ways it shows up, in increasing order of annoyance.

Moving hosts breaks email. The site moves, the mail records are not carried across, and enquiries stop arriving. Usually discovered several days later.

An outage takes both. The machine that stops serving your website is the machine holding your inbox. The one channel a customer would use when the site is down is also gone.

A hosting dispute affects both. A billing problem, a suspension, an account lock. Losing a website for a week is bad. Losing a week of correspondence is worse.

The third is rare and the first is common enough to be a category of small business disaster.

The other difference: how good it is

Hosting mail is a side product for most hosts, and it shows.

Spam filtering is usually noticeably worse. Storage is smaller. Mobile syncing works less reliably. Search across a large mailbox is slow or absent. Shared sending reputation means your delivery depends on other customers.

That last one is the most consequential and the least visible. Your legitimate quotes arrive in somebody's junk folder because of another business on the same machine.

A dedicated mail provider handles all of that as its main product rather than an included extra.

What separating actually involves

1. Choose a mail provider and set up the addresses there.
2. Change the mail records on your domain to point at them.
3. Migrate existing mail, which most providers have a tool for.
4. Update the devices that check the old mailboxes.
5. Leave the old mailboxes in place for a fortnight to catch stragglers.
6. Then turn them off, deliberately rather than by forgetting.

It is an afternoon for a small business, and the fifth step is what prevents losing anything in transit.

The one thing to get right is the records. A mistake there means mail bouncing or arriving nowhere, and it is the part worth having somebody check.

What it costs

Per mailbox, monthly, in the region of a coffee.

For a business with three addresses that is a small annual figure against correspondence that contains your quotes, your customer history and your invoices.

The saving from using included mailboxes is real and small. The cost of losing a week of enquiries is neither, and it is a cost you cannot estimate afterwards because you never find out what was sent.

Worth noting the middle option: some businesses keep one included mailbox for automated messages from the site and put the human correspondence somewhere proper. That splits the risk without paying for mailboxes nobody reads.

Addresses at your own domain

Separate from where mail lives, and worth stating because it is the more visible half.

An address at your own domain rather than a free consumer provider does two things. It looks established, and it means the address is yours rather than borrowed.

A business using a free address on its van is telling customers something it did not intend to. It also cannot take that address anywhere, and cannot give a departing employee's address to their replacement.

This is independent of hosting. You can have addresses at your own domain regardless of where the mailboxes physically sit, and the two decisions are worth making separately rather than being bundled by whoever set things up first.

A worked example

A courier company moving hosts to fix a slow website.

The migration went well. The site was faster, everything looked right, and the old host was cancelled at the end of the month.

Nine days later somebody asked why a regular client had not been in touch. The mail records had moved with the domain to the new host, where the mailboxes did not exist. Every message sent to the business in those nine days had bounced.

They could not recover the messages, and had no record of who had tried. The only fix was contacting every client to explain and ask them to resend.

Had mail been with a separate provider, moving the website would not have touched it. The migration would have been exactly as successful and nothing else would have happened.

Choosing a provider

The practical criteria, since the options all look similar from outside.

Storage large enough that you never delete anything, because searching your own correspondence is more valuable than tidiness. Spam filtering that works without training. Reliable syncing across phone, laptop and anything else.

Sensible handling of shared addresses, so that a general enquiry address can be read by several people without sharing a password.

And a straightforward way to add and remove people, because the day somebody leaves is the day you find out how difficult that is.

Where the servers sit is worth a moment if you hold customer information and have said anything in a privacy policy about where it is stored. It is easier to check before choosing than to change afterwards.

If you are staying where you are

Not everybody wants to move mail today, and there are worthwhile steps that do not require it.

Know where your mail records point, so that a future migration cannot break them by accident. Write it down with your hosting details.

Make sure at least two people can access the main mailbox, so one person leaving is not a loss of correspondence.

And check the mailbox is actually being backed up, which for included hosting mail is frequently not the case.

Set up forwarding from the important addresses to somewhere else as an interim. It is not a substitute for separation, and it does mean a copy of incoming mail exists outside the hosting account.

That takes ten minutes and covers the worst version of the problem, which is losing correspondence you cannot reconstruct. It also means that if you do move later, you already know which addresses are actually in use.

The relationship between the domain, the site and the mail records is the same one described in domains and hosting, explained once.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.