Okay, we're back to talk about email aliases, I'm going to kind of revisit what happens when you send a message to someone like when you send a message to Fred, because it'll help you understand what an alias is and why and alias can be a very or aliases plural can be a very, very, very useful administrative tool. You know someone at a company, you probably end up corresponding with them via email Fred at PDQ calm. Well, Fred is most likely to make broad use of that address, he's going to use it for his business correspondence, he's probably going to use it for personal correspondence, which is fine and great. If Fred ends up subscribing to something or Fred ends up signing up for a service of some sort. And he uses that same address, you end up starting to load a lot of stuff on that one name and that one resource and it actually will become hard to manage on if you Let it just go out of control.

That's where email aliases come in from me. So what's an email alias? it you can think of it as a nickname. Right? Your name may be Martha, you may have a sister that calls you Marty, it's still you. An email alias, which sometimes called an email forward is a nickname for a mailbox.

Here's the critical thing. It basically works on a one way basis on an inbound incoming messages only basis, you don't send email from a forward. It's a different name that ends up in a designated same mailbox. So here's someone else. They're going to send a mail message, need a copy of my mail message. They're going to send a mail message but they don't have Fred's address, they've actually going to slightly different address for Fred.

Let's say he created the Email alias. admin at PDQ calm. So this person says I need some help from the admin, the address they're sending in on his admin at PDQ calm. Their server still finds out that PDQ comm is over here still makes a connection to over here. All right. And then the server does something a little bit smart it looks up and says wait a minute, admin equals Fred.

I'm going to actually take that incoming message and stick it in Fred's inbox. There is no actual admin mailbox. So when Fred picks up his mail, he's going to get that message as well. When Fred replies it's actually going to come from Fred at PDQ. Not admin at PDQ, calm, so it's a one way inbound. They're frequently called mail forwards.

There's sometimes called male aliases. Why should you care? Isn't this just isn't this Just overhead. Hang on a sec, let me point a few things out about mail aliases and why they're really useful. The key concept here is how email tends to be integral in linking things on the net. When you sign up for something, it almost always is, what's your email address, you'll see some services that ask for Facebook address.

I say no to those because that's not in my control. Whereas mail alias at a company with the domain that we've registered using mind control, I can take that on forever and ever. Whereas if I get ticked off at Facebook, like, are they me, they could shut me down. But when you start signing up for multiple services, which I guarantee will happen if you're doing a virtual cloud hosted company, and it's mostly got advantages. If you send everything to personal mailboxes, it gets really, really hard to make If you think about it, the key it asset, the key. Yeah, the key data access and security asset when your systems are somewhere else virtual cloud hosted is actually the credentials for sign on.

If Fred decides to sign up for a backup service, and he's gonna use it to backup his computer, and he signs it up from Fred at PDQ, calm. Fred leaves the company. What do you do? Do you keep his email address alive and read stuff from his mom for the next two years, Jesse can keep the backup service running, or do you manage a little more deliberately by using forwards or aliases? Let's say we've got a service out here somewhere. I use backup as an example.

So we'll make that the example. You decide we're gonna sign up for this actual backup service. When you sign up, of course, it's going to ask For your credit card, and it's going to ask for an email address. So what I would do very quickly and it's a habit is I would actually go make an email alias or an email forward, called a backup at PDQ calm. And I would say, for now, Fred, you're handling backup, guess what? as backup goes to Fred, which means any messages from this service, go to Fred.

He's got the password. He's got the access. If we hire someone else and say you need to take over backup, we hire Barney. And we give Barney his own mailbox, right? Then I just change where that alias points and the backup stuff starts going to Barney's email box. Here's the cool thing about that.

This list of aliases is actually the end inventory of services that you've subscribed to. It is surprisingly hard to keep track of all the stuff that you signed up for. Because there's lots of trials and there's lots of freemium business models out there, this backup, that online collaboration service this video, that whatever, you'll sign up for it, try it, you may forget about it. If you're paying for it, you should remember it. But even then, keeping track of those things is a pain. But if your mail hosting company lets you set up aliases or forwards you have an inventory of all of the stuff that you've signed up for in the form of those aliases, and you're in control.

Think of the email alias email forward as the old fashioned switchboard, right. An office used to have one inbound phone number, and then someone sitting there patching the calls and I did that with actual phone cards many years ago. at a hotel switchboard. You Once a guest in room 310, I will plug in that call with a cable to 310 email. aliases email forwards, make email addresses work the same way you've got your own PBX public branch exchange for email addresses. And that means you can take control of it.

You can think of it as being akin to mail stops if you've ever worked at a big company mail stop 310 Mail stop 311 etc, etc. By aliasing it by making it forward, you get an inventory of the services, you actually have a way to separate control of those assets from individual employees inboxes you have the ability to reassign them to other people or if you want to keep an eye on something, you can also split them we will all frequently make an email alias that goes to several people in the company. So if we had a help at save visually calm alias, probably go to multiple of us, we made sure we helped someone on that inbound message. And then if we grew to the point where one person was handling all the help requests, I can make that alias, just go to them. So I really encourage you really, really encourage you to look for a hosting service with no limits on email, and no limits on forwards and forwards, your aliases, and hopefully a pretty decent dashboard for administering those.

Last tip about email for a virtual cloud hosted company. I touched on this a minute ago. passwords and accounts are actually probably the most critical asset as the systems technology and data are out there somewhere else scattered around. If you don't have the accountant password, you don't have control the asset and it's your business data out there. So I would strongly consider if you have employees or people in the team that are starting to add services to the next, make sure that they document what they've signed up for and under what credentials, encourage or require them to use forwards aliases, not their own personal mailbox gives you a level of control or a level of audit, if you need that gives you the ability to deal with that asset. If they leave the company and write that stuff down.

If you don't have an inventory of the critical forwards or aliases, and passwords and accounts of the services you use, it'll end up biting you because you'll either end up paying for something you're not using, or when you need to get to it. Nobody will know who signed up for what the password is, or something else like that your data that's out there. But the keys to that data are those accounts and passwords and mail aliases are really helpful way of making that happen. So I hope that helps you out. It's actually made my life a whole bunch easier. And it was one Tip I was really looking forward to sharing.

That's it. More to come