When we build your website, we often configure email addresses on your server, such as info@mydomain.co.uk. So what is the best way to access your business’s custom email address(es). There are three main ways:
- via webmail client provided by your hosting provider
- via desktop email client
- via online email client
Using an online email client like those offered by Google and Yahoo! has some important advantages over using a desktop email client, such as Outlook, in that your email is always accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection. We like to make it easier for our customers to aggregate their email into one place, and most people we work with use Gmail as their preferred mail client. We’ve put together this guide to help you smarten up your business’s presentation by using a professional-looking email associated with your domain name, while managing your emails in one place.
Step 1: Check Your Mail with Gmail
There are two ways we can forward email to your bespoke email address, e.g. info@mydomain.co.uk:
- set forwarder on your server
- configure Gmail to check your server and retrieve mail
It really is personal preference how you wish to proceed. Option 1 has the benefit that you have less set up to do in your Gmail, while Option 2 has the benefit of keeping everything configured in one place. If you would like to configure your email to be retrieved by Gmail we will provide the information that you need and here’s what you need to do.
- click Settings link in top right of Gmail
- click Accounts and Import link in Settings
- click Add POP3 email account button
- enter email address you wish to retrieve messages for
- enter the POP3 details that we supply you with: username, password, POP server
That’s it, you’re good to go! Remember that whether you configure a forwarder on your server or set up your message retrieval through Gmail, there may be a slight lag between sending and receiving of email. This is because the forwarder/retriever will fire every few seconds, rather than continuously, so do not be alarmed by a short delay.
Step 2: Send Email from Your Gmail
Once you are receiving emails to your bespoke email address, you’ll want to ‘reply as’ when responding to your customers. You can configure your Gmail to ‘Send mail as’ by following these steps.
- click the Send mail from another address button
- enter the name and email you wish to send as and click the Next step button
- choose the Send through SMTP servers option and enter the information we will provide you with – server, port, username and password – and click the Add Acccount button
Presto! You can now send mail as your custom email address from within Gmail. To your customers it will appear as if the email has come from info@mydomain.co.uk rather than from your Gmail account.
Set Your Signature
Configuring a signature for each of the email accounts that you manage through your Gmail adds a nice touch to your business emails and allows you to incorporate links to your website, your Facebook Page and so on. This is how you do it.
- click the General link in Settings
- choose the email address you wish to set a signature for
- enter your name and details as desired
- link to your website by:
- clicking the Link icon
- entering the text to use for the link and entering the full web address of your site
- click OK
- click the Save changes button at the bottom of the Settings page
Set link in email signature
Congrats you are good to go with fully professional email presentation managed through your Gmail! Want to learn more? Sign up to our free feed for more great tips and tricks