If you have read the Tetsou article 'How
To Create A Business Email Address', you will know that you don't have to
have a website to use your newly purchased domain name. You don't even need
an email account associated with the name as long as your domain name provider
allows you to forward email as part of its general package of services. In the
UK I use 123-reg
from Pipex as my preferred name provider, which provides many of these options.
Email With Websites
If you own a website then your domain name will be associated with your hosting account. In this case your hosting provider will supply you with a control panel to manage email associated with your site and its domain name. You will have the option to either set up a POP3 mailbox - in effect creating an email account on the server - or simply forward email from an address to another external account or both. Don't worry about POP3 accounts for the moment. Most hosting accounts are set up with at least one default POP3 mailbox. In this example, I'm just going to assume that you will forward email to your Yahoo email account, although the technique will work for any email external account you may own, for example Gmail.
The Email 'Catch-All' Address
When you take ownership of your website your hosting provider will probably have set up something called a 'Catch-All' address for your email (also called the default address). Any undefined email addressed to your domain that simply ends with @yourdomain.com is 'caught' by this address. Your hosting account will normally come with a control panel to manage this address. Its default is to reject all incoming mail:
*@mydomain.com ->REJECT
Don't be tempted to simply forward the Catch-All address to your external email account as it will likely be overwhelmed by spam. Instead, simply decide on an email address for your site that you want to manage and forward it. For example:
->
In this scenario, all email addressed to your domain will be sent to the Catch-All address except for
which will now be forwarded to your Yahoo Mail Plus account. The specifics of each hosting accounts's control panel may vary, but most provide the facilities of managing the Catch-All address and email forwarding.
Using Yahoo Email
Yahoo email is an amazing web-based email management tool - now with unlimited email storage - with many advanced spam and addressing options as part of its Mail Plus service. It's those addressing and filtering options that we will want to use for our email command and control centre.
You now have email arriving from key addresses of your website to your main Yahoo Mail Plus account; in this example
. If you just left things at this stage your main Yahoo inbox would fill up with a confusing mix of email from various accounts. To streamline things still further you can use the ability of Yahoo Mail Plus to sort incoming email to an appropriate folder using an email filter or rule:
Select Mail Options from the Yahoo Mail control panel
Select Filters
Select Add from the option on the form Name the filter In the rule section add the rule From Header
Contains mydomain.com
Select a new folder name to move the email to in the Then section
Example Rule - Mydomain
IF From Header Contains mydomain.com Move the message to Mydomain Folder
In other words, if someone sends an email to
you should see a new email flagged in your Mydomain folder in your Yahoo control panel. If you had several addresses from this domain forwarded to Yahoo and you wanted these sorted into separate folders, you would have to have a more granular filter or rule. As an example:
IF From Header Contains Move the message to Info Folder
In summary
Step 1 - Forward An Email Address
info@mydomain - >
Step 2 - Add An Email Filter
IF From Header Contains mydomain.com Move the message to Mydomain Folder
It is important to note that we have simply setup a forwarding address on the hosting account; email is not stored on this server. For this you would have to set up a POP account, which is something different. You'll find that many hosting services provide you with the ability to setup unlimited POP email accounts on their servers; I only ever use one!
But what if you want to send email from your website address e.g.
? Again this can be done via your Yahoo account and I'll explain how it's done in the next article in the series.
Tetsou
Send Me Your Questions
If you have any questions or comments on the above article or you have a question on a specific email problem, then email me at
and I'll try to provide you with an answer.
