Email Hosting - Giving Life to Virtual Communication
Introduction:
Computers and Internet has really made lot of things possible that seemed impossible few years back. A common man never even imagined that there will be a time when there will be a new era of communication wherein one person would easily be able to communicate with other sitting thousands of miles away. With the invention of electronic mail, it has really become possible to communicate with anyone in any part of the world. But what is that secret that gives life to this form of modern communication known as E-Mail? There is something that acts as a blood to keep this so called E-Mail alive in the world of Internet, and what is that? That something is known as Email Hosting.
Email Hosting is something that can be referred to as a technique that hosts email servers. Just like any other website is hosted on a web server to become live on internet, similarly email also needs a host to be live on the internet and the activity of taking email servers live on internet is termed as Email Hosting. It's the best way to establish one's own identity and is appropriate for a variety of users who possess certified email address as their own domain name. Companies providing such type of hosting services are known as Email hosting providers.
Basic Understanding:
Since there is a huge possibility of email exchanges, sharing of contacts, calendars, scheduling online meetings etc in different companies, Email hosting can be a very appealing option. Email hosting is often provided by companies having large server resources and by offering such type of services to different organizations, Email hosting companies automatically become responsible to maintain the security of their clients, their email accounts as well as the consistency of their servers on which all the email accounts are stored. It is usual practice for a company that provides email hosting to store its subscribers email archive on their servers. And since email service is a service that is always on and live on internet, Email hosting companies must also ensure that their servers are always up and running.
This service is basically intended to provide cost effective email hosting solution to businesses that cannot afford to or want to spend their precious resources and time to build an internal communication infrastructure, and the main reason behind this is that the never ending maintenance can increase the cost and possibility of virus infections and various other software and hardware related problems.
Benefits of Email Hosting:
There are various advantages of outsourcing your communication needs to a hosting company, some of the considerable are listed below.
Secure Webmail: Access In secure webmail access, Email host companies normally equip their servers with Industry encryption which is 128-bit, and that remains active during the complete webmail session. What this means is that the complete to and fro transition of data from server that is happening is completely encrypted from the moment user signs in till the moment user signs out. This is a proven source of security protocol, and hence can ensure no interception or compromise to the sensitive messages in anyway.
Secure IMAP and POP Access: Now a day's more and more businesses prefer solutions to Email Hosting since secure access is enabled using them to desktop email clients through POP or IMAP. All the communication traffic gets encrypted including all the data transferred from email client to mail server for authentication and this includes usernames and passwords too. Almost all the popular mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail etc are supported by all reputed Hosting providers and most importantly most of them even provide support for BSD clients and Linux as well as pocket PC's and PDAs. An email hosting plan ensures efficient and secure management of your email either online or offline.
Adequate Storage Space: A robust amount of storage is provided for each mailbox created when you sign up for an email hosting account. Some providers offer storage space in GB while some in MB, whatever the limit may be, however all the hosting companies often provide storage space that is more than enough limit to store thousands of critical messages. The more flexible a hosting plan is, the more it allows the users to easily upgrade or downgrade storage limit.
Shared Address Book: This is a very positive attribute many email clients have since it offers the user a more suitable option to stock data for easy use and retrieval in future. Private and Shared address books are offered by majority of email hosting service providers that come along with access to public network directory services. Shared address book can easily be used with any mail client that supports LDAP directory services in most of the cases.
Spam and Virus Filtering: Potentially harmful communication is blocked before it tries to access the network in Email hosting plan with spam and virus filtering feature. In this case Host's SMTP gateways integrate Anti-virus scanners and spam is treated in various other ways. If your best email hosting service provider is really genuine and reliable and gives priority also to keep spam emails out of your network, they will utilize several filtering methods to get rid of spam. These filtering methods can be grey listing, white listing and blacklisting. These methods allow for the making of configurations that send spam into a quarantine folder instead of your Email folder automatically.
Conclusion:
Choosing a right best email hosting service provider can be little critical since lot of factors are to be considered before that such as the size of your organization, good technical support etc, however its always advisable to do a little research on your requirements, analyze them, compare it with several hosting plans offered by reputed companies and choose the best one that suits your needs. Electronic mail has now a day's become widespread method of communication that can really allow a person to overcome all the communication barriers. It's really important to consider email hosting as a primary option if you are no longer able to dominate communication network internally.
