Nora Brown Design

How do I check my new email account?

A lot of clients, after they have purchased their domain name and hosting account, ask me, “How do I get an email address that matches my domain name?”. When that is resolved (by simply logging in to the hosting account and setting one up), the question becomes, “How do I check that email account?”.

Many people have a Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL account, and they are familiar with going to the respective email provider’s website, logging in, and checking their email. So when I ask them what “email client” they use (to assist them in checking their new account), they’ll say “Yahoo,” or “AOL” which is perfectly understandable. But there is a difference between an email provider, like Yahoo, and an email client. An email client is simply a software program installed on your computer that is used to send and receive email from one or more accounts. Therein lies a major difference—I can’t check my norabrowndesign.com account by logging into my Yahoo! account on Yahoo’s website see addendum, but I can check any number of email accounts on my computer with Mac Mail, or other clients like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook. (NB: One exception to all this is Gmail, which actually serves as an email provider and an email client via their Mail Fetcher.)

Setting up an email client to check your new email account requires some random-seeming pieces of information. The relevant setting are usually POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) settings, which are respectively incoming and outgoing settings. Honestly, I don’t even know what “port numbers” and such are all about, but luckily hosting providers have step-by-step instructions; here are a couple of common ones:

• from godaddy.com’s email faq page. Click on your specific email client.
• from aplus.net’s knowledge base. About halfway down you will see “Local Email Client – Generic Settings” and following that there is a list instructions for specific clients.
• from dreamhost’s support wiki. First choose your operating system, then your desired client.

Now, a second difference, and a disadvantage with my computer-based email client is that when I’m away from my computer, I’m away from my centralized, all-in-one email checker. Luckily, I can still check each of my email accounts individually by going to the provider’s web sites, or in the case of your own domain’s email (like me@mydomainname.com) you will usually log in at something like email.mydomainname.com, or www.mydomainname.com/mail. Then you will see an interface similar to Yahoo’s or Gmail’s (though quite stripped down and with no ads) from which you can read and send email.

In some cases, your email client will give you the option to either keep the messages on the server, or delete them once you have downloaded them to your computer. Unless you don’t have much storage for your account, I recommend keeping copies on your server, so you can access them even when you’re away from your computer.

ADDENDUM

I recently discovered that you CAN send and receive emails from an external account using Yahoo! web-based email. Here are some set-up instructions. In fact, this is included with a free Yahoo! email account, whereas POP3 access to your Yahoo! mail (ie access via Outlook or Mail) require an upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus.