Business Email

Almost all businesses now have some form of e-mail facility, although some may be using individual addresses hosted on an ISP account. This sort of arrangement is satisfactory for very light use, but quickly becomes inoperable when the amount of mail increases, or more than one user wishes to have e-mail.

Start on the right footing

A business should always use domain-based email accounts, the domain being the property of, and registered in the name of the business itself and not to some third party such as a website-design outfit. For example, if your firm manufacures widgets, and you register the domain widgets.com them email addresses would typically be sally<at>widgets.com or brian.rogers<at>widgets.co.uk

I cannot overstress this point. Several gotchas lurk in-waiting if other arrangements are used. Firstly, if you allow a third party to register a domain on your behalf, but to register it in their name instead of yours, that third party can hold you to ransom for the domain. If your business communication depends on the domain, that could have extremely serious consequences. I see this kind of situation arise oh-so-often when a firm contracts to have a website built. Ensure that all business domains are owned by you.

Secondly, if you allow your staff to create their own personal email accounts for business use, for example at Yahoo or Gmail, then there is again the risk of being held to ransom. The risk in this case arises when the employee leaves the firm. You have no control over the email account they have been using to conduct YOUR business, and the ex-employee may simply take that email account and the business it brings to a competitor.

Thirdly, if you use an account at an ISP, for example joe35353<at>flybynightisp.com then you are effectively shackling yourself to that ISP. Any change if Internet provider will also mean a change of email address, and consequent reprinting of all business stationery.

Mailreader Programs

Microsoft Outlook tends to be used on the majority of sites. There is a valid argument for this, in that most office staff are familiar with it. Tha said, Outlook is costly to licence, and tends to be a rather high-maintenance option in terms of generating all sorts of occasional weird glitches.

If you have an open mind on this aspect, then Thunderbird, from the Mozilla programmers, promises to be a real rival to Outlook both in terms of functionality and its vastly better security. For the majority of sites with more than a handful of users, Outlook will probably be the de-facto choice, though.

A Mailserver - Or not?

There is a tendency to assume that since Outlook has been chosen as the desktop email software, it follows that Exchange, Microsoft's mailserver package,  must also be installed. I see numerous small sites with an Exchange server feeding email to perhaps only three Outlook users. This is crazy. The situation typically arises not through any actual assessment of requirements, but because installers are told to 'push' such products wherever the opportunity presents itself.

In fact, very small sites don't typically need an inhouse mailserver. Collection of email direct from an ISP's server will be perfectly OK for the sort of mail volumes involved here. It should be remembered that inhouse mailservers are one of the more mainenance-heavy items of equipment, so why impose the requirement for frequent  maintenance-bills on a piece of equipment you don't actually need?

As a site grows larger, it becomes an advantage to run your own inhouse mailservice instead of relying on an outside host. Why? Well, mainly because that way, internal desk-to-desk messages then don't have to pass through your Internet connection. Plus, you have options for much tighter control and monitoring of the flow of email. Excactly where the switchover point is, is hard to say, but I'd be inclined to think in terms of a mailserver for ten or more users in one office.

Which Mailserver Package?

Where mailservers are concerned, the 'brand 'leader' in terms of number of servers deployed is almost certainly ... Linux. This might come as a surprise, since you only occasionally see Linux mailservers on company premises. But, we must not forget that ISP's mailservers are almost invariably Linux-based, and these make up by far the greatest bulk of email-handling computers in the world.

In the corporate office environment, I would imagine that  Microsoft Exchange holds the greatest market share. Exchange, like most Redmond products, is very heavily integrated with other Microsoft server-side software,  and in general you cannot run an Exchange server in-isolation, you must  accept that you are going to run your whole network the Microsoft way, or nothing. Jokingly this is sometimes referred-to as the 'Microsoft Manacle.' This, combined with the need for powerful hardware to run Exchange, make it a relatively costly option.

If you don't need the special features of Exchange -and most small sites do not- then there are several less-costly alternatives. Alt-N MDaemon from RIM, the company that gave us Blackberry handsets, is an excellent alternative to exchange. Its feature set is very comprehensive. In many ways it is easier to manage than Exchange, with the status of any given message being relatively easy to determine via its graphical interface. Other options are the Mercury mailserver running on Windows, or various Linux packages. It's certainly worth taking a look at these options before deciding.

If after all is said you decide to take the Microsoft Exchange route, the main point is that you must install adequate hardware to support what is probably the most heavyweight email package of all. Attempting to run Exchange on a budget-class server is a recipe for grief... and for massive support costs, because with inadequate memory or processing power at its disposal, it will simply keep-on glitching, again and again. I quite frequently gat asked to troubleshoot ailing Exchange setups on small business sites, and bay far-and-away the most common issue is an attempt to squeeze a quart out of a pint pot, in terms of running what is a behemoth piece of software on puny hardware. Basically there is only one answer here, and that is to spend some money on better hardware.

To operate an onsite mailserver effectively, at least a broadband Internet-connection is necessary. Not all broadband accounts are suitable for running mailservers on, so ask for advice before signing-up. If the mailserver is mission-critical to the company, then dual broadband lines or a fibre connection might be advisable. Again these items represent additional costs of an onsite server,and should be taken into account when deciding which email setup to employ.

Spam

Junk mail is probably the single greatest problem faced by business users of email. One site which asked for advice was receiving thousands of spams a day. In fact, over 99% or incoming email was being rejected by spamfiltering software set to a very aggressive filtering level. Obvious problem here was that valid mesages were being lost too, even to the extent that some users at their own branch offices were being blacklisted as spammers for no apparent reason.

The cause? Nothing whatsoever to do with the email system itself. The company had recently engaged a new website design team to work on an aggressive promotional campaign involving multiple websites, one for each area of the client's business. Each of these websites contained multiple pages bearing unprotected 'Mailto' email links. These unprotected email links were being harvested by spammers' robots, programs which trawl the Web looking for just such sucker-sites with poor security. Each unprotected link was then being hit with multiple mailshots from just-about every junkmail operator on the planet.

Thus, if you have a spam problem, first place to look is your website, for security issues which allow your company email addresses to be harvested. If that proves to be clean, next place to look is other websites which might carry your email address.

There are also a few security issues which can arise with email systems themselves, leading to accounts being spammed. But, these issues pale into insignificance beside the problem of address-harvesting from insecure webpages. For more info on this, and tools to help you identify insecure websites, visit our spamfighting minisite, spamwise.org

Multiple sites or roving users

Businesses with offices in multiple locations, or with many roving users always pose a challenge to achieving a smooth-running and reliable email service.

With any such setup, a good deal of thought needs to be given to the requirements of staff in the various locations, and to the best way to meet those requirements. Rushing-in of a standard off-the-peg package without proper thought as to its limitations will almost certainly lead to numerous problems.

It may be that a central inhouse mailserver will prove the best option. However, any such central server must have a high-integrity Internet connection of sufficient bandwidth to cope with all external users. The main consideration here is to evaluate the possible consequences of a failure of the central equipment. Is a downtime of several hours or days for the entirety of company email aceptable? If not, then such contingencies need to be planned-for.
 
One point which I'm always keen to stress is that the licensing restrictions on small-business IT products seldom stretch to serving multiple sites, a multi-site firm being regarded as 'not a small business' by typical vendors.  Yet, time and time again I see products such as Microsoft's SBS server being stretched into the role of serving multiple branch offices. This is not good practice, and it's asking for a major outage at some point if hardware fails. Check the licence terms. If you are operating outside of the permitted T&C then you have no comeback when it all falls down around your ears.

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To Summarise:

• Register a domain for business email. Ensure that you own the domain
• ISP-based accounts are fine for light use, and inexpensive to set-up
• For larger volumes of mail, consider having your own  mailserver
• If you choose Exchange as your mailserver, you need heavy iron to run this on
• You don't have to use Exchange. There are other less resource-hungry mailservers
• To operate centralised email, you need a business-grade  broadband line
• Small-business products are typically not designed to serve multiple branch offices