(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)
Tattoos... websites... email addresses... nobody has just 1!
Once you set up your second website… you have a decision to make: “Which email address should I use?”
Your default email address strategy may be like what I used to do: point everything at gmail.com. But that’s not a long term solution. As your web presence grows and you start to succeed in your business, your email will need to brand you. And some vendors won’t do business with free email addresses, not even from gmail (ask me about this sometime).
And you will need sales@, info@, support@, email addresses too, once you grow up.
Turns out it’s not that hard. You can set up all this up very easily with each WordPress installation. The trick is to set up your emails and forwarders at the same time you set up your database and user for wordpress installation.
There’s two basic ideas to understand: you can have your email as pure forwarding, or forwarding from an account. Each technique has advantages and disadvantages.
Pure forwarding
Pure forwarding, easy, one place for emails. I log into my hosting account (Bluehost, highly recommended), and set up an email forwarder to point at my gmail account. I do NOT create an email account on the host. Emails to such addresses only exist at gmail.
If you use gmail, pure forwarding can be used in conjunction with a drop down menu in the “From:” field when you are composing emails. For example, “drwordpress at dr-wordpress dot co*” forwards to gmail, and can be answered from gmail. Go ahead, email me. I’ll prove it! (If you have read this far, you should be able to reconstruct the email address.)
Forwarding from an account
Forward from an account, little bit more difficult, have to keep an eye on account quotas, but you get some backups automatically.
This is a good technique if relying on a single point of failure makes you nervous (it does me). At some point, Google will become as regulated as ATT became. This is a few years away to be sure, but still, having your whole business rely on a single provider just doesn’t seem too smart.
In any case, set up your email accounts on your host, then set up a forwarder such that a copy of each email is left on the server. You get the convenience of reading your email in one place (say, gmail), with the assurance that there are copies of each email not dependent on Google’s good will. Right now, in 2009, Google is one of the “good guys.” It might not always be this way, and having your business depend on a single point of failure is unwise.
