Please note this is Linked From our Main Article – 7 Things Clients Should Know When Building A Website
4 of 7 – Email Setup Should Be Easy For Account Managers, Owners, Marketing Managers and Clients – Setting up Email easily, without Complexity or Frustration for Clients
We spend a good 10% of any project ensuring a website is tested to look consistent across 20 different web browsers; and websites are certainly a lot more complicated than email right? Wrong – Since the advent of email, there hasn’t been a reasonable standard available for consistent email formatting and type rendering.
Why do I say this? Because irrespective of the email setup or setups you rely on; Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Entourage, Mobile, Desktop, Mac, PC, Unix, Webmail, POP, IMAP or Microsoft Exchange (the list goes on and on), they are forever changing rules each time a new version comes out and they never seem to play nice with each other. Even simple things like sending a text email from say Mac Mail to a Outlook Express on a PC sees irregularities like font size or formatting based on preferences or simply the software saying “well it’s only an email – as long as you can read it, no point being pedantic”. Staying in the good books for email, both for your setup and the person you send email to means keeping it simple.
Set a basic email signature; logo, text, text web-links. Complex HTML emails often render incorrectly across platforms or worse drop email attachments as the receiving software gets confused over the MIME boundaries (Mail Extensions).
When setting up email for the first time or changing your current setup, it will either ‘just work’ from the simple settings you are provided or, still highly recommended over self setup – that you have an internal / external IT team who should set this up for you. If you are trying to syncronise email over more than one device, you will need IT support. If you don’t have an IT supplier, get one recommended to you who has setup the exact same service before, unless you are happy to pay for their email education. Finally backup emails in a format you can access if everything goes pear shaped – well before migrating your service.
If all else fails and you are frustrated by your email or worried where they are going, log into webmail (or ask for this access). If webmail is working you know your e-mailbox is active and the problem is with your devices setup or IT support.