Does your business use email effectively?

1. Control your brand.
2. Improve your customer communications.
3. Use best-in-class providers.

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Control your brand.

Does your business card have your domain in the web address, but someone else's domain for the email?

First, get and keep control over your own domain. It will give you freedom to change providers whenever you wish, and predictability -- your email address won't change unless you decide it should.

Then, use your domain for email, not just for web hosting. Keep customers focused on you, not your providers. Got that covered already? Then...

Improve your customer communications.

Make it easier for customers to do business with you, and easier for employees to manage customer email, using these proven techniques:

• Use role addresses such as sales@yourdomain, to direct incoming mail to the best person to handle it. Don't make your customers change their behavior, and don't let mail get delayed, when someone is on vacation or out sick. Create unique temporary addresses for special purposes, such as marketing campaigns or promotions.

  Use an advanced email client program that can send outgoing mail with proper From: and Reply-To: addresses in your domain (not someone else's), and varying with the role or purpose.

• Use distribution lists to direct incoming mail to a group of people. This works well when it is clear who will deal with each message. Subscribe to Internet mailing lists with user sub-addressing, sending each directly to its own mailbox, to keep your inbox clear for more urgent matters.

  Archive your lists with direct-to-shared-mailbox addressing, so employees can search through past messages that are already categorized.

• Use shared mailboxes to dispatch incoming mail to individuals for handling: If it's especially important to give a timely reply, the responsibility rotates often, or customers should not be forced to attend to your workers' specialities. Use access control lists (ACLs) to ensure supervisors can access mail sent to and from individual workers, and to let users collaborate by sharing read-only or full access to particular mailboxes and users.

• Use server-resident filters to dispatch or file mail based on properties of each message, even when sent to the same address. Both user-level and domain-wide filters run on each message delivered.

Use best-in-class providers.

Is your email hosted with your domain registrar just because it seemed like an easy option? Did they throw it in for free? Do they take email as seriously as you do, or are you lumped in with "recreational" users, and treated accordingly?

Is it hosted with your web site? Which of those services brings them more revenue, and which one do you think they will care more about? Is it hosted by your ISP? They all offer commodity email service at no extra charge, but is the least common denominator what you need?

Your stored email messages are vital business records.

• Storing your email on a central server is the best way to make it accessible to authorized users, and to enable the above email management techniques.

• Hosting your email with an email specialist is the best way to ensure it is backed up to protect against loss, and secure to maintain confidentiality.

You have power you may not realize to choose the best providers for different aspects of your Internet service. Network access, domain registration, email, and web hosting are bundled by many providers, but you are not locked-in. Knowing just a little bit about how the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) works will give you great power, to choose what to bundle and from whom, doing what is best for your business.