All right, my favorite and sometimes least favorite net technology email. I've been working with email for over 20 years since before people were sending email between companies. I've been very intrigued to watch how it evolves as a way of working with people. It's got a lot of disadvantages as a collaborative tool. But it's kind of ubiquitous, you probably have multiple email addresses. And if you're setting up your company, you want you're going to want control of email.

I'm going to try to cover two things in this section, possibly two pieces. One is the basics of administration of that email service that's probably up with your web hosting. And the other is some administrative tips that are very, very, very useful relating to email, as it ties into hosted applications, software as a service and other apps that we'll be getting into later sections. Please don't skip That's action because boy can it make your life a lot easier as your as your company or your operation starts to grow a bit on the humble at sign in email celebrated some sort of anniversary, I want to say 30 years or something like that. Not too long back. You know what an email address looks like.

And when we say an email address now, we basically mean internet email Fred at PDQ, calm, that kind of format, you probably got multiple email addresses yourself. So let's touch on some sort of basic building blocks of what's involved in Fred. Having an email box a box, right, metaphors kind of built in there. Fred at PDQ calm. So at the hosting service for pdq.com somewhere. There's an entry that says we've got a mailbox which is a special kind of structure that's tied to us.

Service that's running seven by 24. that's designed to get inbound mail, figure out if the address exists, stick it in that spot to be picked up and take care of sending outbound mail from our buddy Fred, out to the rest of the world. So, if you decide to send any message to Fred, just so you understand the basics of what's happening there, where you are somewhere out in the world, running some sort of device, when you say, mail to Fred at PDQ calm. You don't actually send it to Fred. Fact you don't even send it to Fred's server or service. Your mail client probably talks to your mail server. That mail server finds Fred's that always directly.

Fred's mail server actually drops it in the magic Fred box, and then when Fred picks it up from whatever device or devices he's picking it up from. He gets Your message. It's actually kind of amazing how email is scaled up to the billions and billions of message sent messages sent every day because you really wasn't designed with that kind of volume in mind. But it's managed to work. It's, it's really an astonishing thing. So that's the basic route of mail messages back and forth.

Let me talk a little bit about the client and configuration side of it. Because if you end up running email service, you're going to bump into this question. I'm on Fred's little desktop app here is a little Mail app here. I'm going to say, how does Fred get his mail First, there's two common on the net. There's two common protocols to come and standards for mail clients to pick up mail from the mail server. That's what that's called pick up mail from that mailbox there.

You may have seen these You were setting up an email client or you open a dialog on your phone or something like that. Pop Post Office Protocol pop three. And I'm app which is Internet Mail Access Protocol pops older, simpler, dumber. I'm app is relatively old. It was developed by u dub University of Washington Seattle, if I'm not mistaken, but it does some stuff that you really want. So generically speaking, when you have a choice, use an app, not pop pops not as secure.

And it actually doesn't handle synchronization of mail and folders between multiple clients the way that I nap does. If you're in a company, you might have an Exchange Server. It's talking to the Outlook client, which is much bigger and more complex than an email client. That's kind of out of scope here. I wouldn't encourage you to run your own Exchange Server on your beginning enough to need it. You may not need the advice I'm trying to put together here.

It's an amazing meal system, but it's a big dog. And it's non trivial to run yourself. And there's licensing costs, so don't go. So when you configure an iMac client and any decent hosting company will have documentation saying, Here's how to set up this email client, here's how to set up that email client. The thing that it really, really helps with is this cloud of gizmos that everyone's starting to have. And what Fred doesn't do is only use one device to get his email, he probably uses two or three or four at least.

And what he doesn't want to do, what you don't want to do is have to remember which device which message is on, basically want it to be all of my email is there. We'll talk about webmail in Gmail in a minute. So if they're all running that I map protocol to connect to the server, things that you delete, things that you move between folders will get synchronized upon the server. And then synchronized back down to the other clients delete a message here. It'll actually tell your mailbox about it, and it'll get deleted here, and it'll get deleted here and deleted, they're moved between folders. Same thing.

On slight technicality, the way mail is sent from a device is actually a different path. It's called smtp. Simple Mail transport protocol. I'm only mentioning it because if you end up configuring mail clients, you end up with two steps. Usually you end up configuring it up and you end up configuring the SMTP. Think of this as inbound.

And this says outbound, because it's spam. There's a lot more shenanigans around SMTP and connecting to smtp. And troubleshooting, it can be kind of a bear, so I wanted you to know what it is. So that's sort of the basics of email, a couple bits of advice to frame email when you'll Looking at web hosting packages, you want a web hosting package that includes email. You don't want to do it in a separate place, generically speaking, you want a mail package that doesn't stick arbitrary limits on you, especially not things like how many mailboxes, that's just knuckleheaded. If you see a hosting package that says this comes with 25 mailboxes, go look a little further, you should end up with essentially unlimited mailboxes, and unlimited storage for those mailboxes.

If you want to impose storage and say people only get X amount of email storage, you may want that control. But don't let someone else dictate that for you. My candid advice, we don't bother with email limits either terms of size of attachments, or total size of mailboxes, storage is not that expensive, and people will hit a threshold of I can't use this anymore, before they end up using up all of your storage on a server. So just think of it as Just think of it as a fairly unlimited resource. So I'm going to give you a quick break and I'm going to do a second section on the administrative uses of email. Don't miss that.

It'll make your life a whole lot easier. I'll be right back.