View source for An introduction to Email

== What is an email address? ==

We use email accounts to send email messages to other people who also have email accounts. You use your email address and password to access your email account, where your email address consists of a username followed by an '@' and then your domain name.

<pre>
support@spiffystores.com.au

'support' is the username
'spiffystores.com.au' is the domain name
</pre>

In order to send an email message to someone, you need to know their email address.

If you want to send messages or read messages that have been sent to you, then you need to know your own email address and the password for the email account. Each email account has a unique email address and password. You create the password when you create the email account, and you can change this password at any time.

== Where are my email messages stored? ==

When someone sends you a email message, they send the message to a mail server which then finds the mail server that is used to host your email account. The message is delivered from the sending mail server to your mail server, where it sits waiting for you to read it.

Each email account uses up disk space on your mail server to store your messages. This space is allocated from the disk space quota that comes with your Spiffy Stores plan, and there is a limit to the number and size of messages that can be stored on the mail server. We provide enough space for you to store your messages for a few weeks, but we recommend that you set up your email accounts to transfer your older email messages somewhere else so that you can keep an archive of all the messages you have received in the past months and years for your business.

== How do I read my email messages? ==

Once someone has sent you a message, it will be received by your mail server and it will sit in the mailbox associated with your email address waiting to be read.

There are two ways to read your email messages, and you need to configure the software on your computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones to use one of these two methods for accessing your mailbox.

== Transferring mail from the server using POP3 ==

The recommended way for you to read your mail is to use the POP3 protocol to transfer the mail from the server mailbox to your computer using a program such as Microsoft Office, Thunderbird or Mac Mail.

When you add your email account to your computer's email program you will be asked to choose a protocol for reading your mailbox. You should choose POP3 on your main business computer.

When you choose POP3, your email messages are transferred from the server to your computer. If you use multiple devices, then you need to choose one of them to act as the '''Master''' computer where you store all your email for your business.

It's very bad to try to configure multiple computers to use POP3 to read the same email account as each computer will retrieve different messages and the messages for your email account will be spread randomly over all the computers, which isn't very useful when you want to find a particular message.

This leads to the first basic rule for managing your email account.

<pre>
Collect your email with POP3 on 1 computer only
</pre>

== Reading your mail on the server using IMAP ==

If only one computer can transfer messages using the POP3 protocol, how are you meant to read your mail on other devices, such as tablets and smartphones?

The answer is to use the IMAP protocol when configuring these secondary devices.

IMAP allows you to read the messages that are sitting in your mailbox on the server. The protocol does not attempt to transfer the messages, but leaves them sitting on the server. This means that you can read your recent messages wherever you have access to the Internet.

You can make IMAP work in conjunction with POP3, because POP3 allows you to configure a period, usually 7 days, where mail on the server is kept on the server even after its been transferred down to your main computer. After 7 days, POP3 will automatically delete the old messages from the server, thus freeing up space for new messages to arrive.

If you don't configure POP3 to delete older messages, then your mailbox will eventually fill up, and you will lose all new messages until the older messages are deleted.

<pre>
Configure smartphones and tablets to read email using IMAP
</pre>

=== Further Reference ===

* [[How does Shipping work?]]