Email Administration And Network Management

Email administration is a technical specialty, like server administration or network management. Knowing one area is no guarantee of talent in another area. You need to find a web hosting company with a reputation for not having chronic email difficulties and that quickly resolves problems as they occur.

When creating a website, one of the important considerations is providing a way for your visitors to get in touch with you. Email access is the most common way of doing so and is one of the most frequently seen add- ons to websites. Email can be used as a way of signing up visitors for your newsletter, give visitors an avenue of communication, for technical issues and a hundred other applications.

lot of progress has been made in the last decade on knocking down the frequency and severity of email based virus attacks. Of course, many viruses have historically been and are spread by email attachments. That's why everyone tells you never to open an unknown attachment. In fact, security experts say to never open attachments which are unexpected period, even opening attachments from a person you know may be done with precaution because some viruses may be forwarded inadvertently by well meaning friends.

Today though, spam is the email public enemy number one. It has been estimated that as much of 97% of email sent is spam! While people may quibble about what is and isn't spam, it can be loosely defined as unwanted commercial email sent by someone to a recipient who has not requested email from.

Spam clogs inboxes, making people sort through tons of junk to find their real messages and is very often offensive in nature. Unfortunately, spam isn't going anywhere soon. Even though many laws have been put in place governing spam, countless spammers continue to risk legal penalties to make money from the very small number of people who open their email and respond not knowing what they are getting into.

Other email problems are even worse for website owners. Some web hosts will shut down a site if they receive complains of spam from relevant authorities. This can sometimes be dealt with by sending a message to an admin who can take your site off of the blacklist if you proof this to be an error or not authorized by the site owner.

For millions of webmasters and site users today, email is the method of choice for communications. When there are errors in the system, someone has to step up and put things right. This means, usually, relying on someone who has skills on how to manage email software’s.

So other than to make a few gripes in print, what's the point of this article anyway? All of these problems are meant to illustrate how important this aspect of server management is – and why it's important to consider when you are looking for a new web hosting company, or are considering a switch. Just like network and server administration, web hosting companies have varying capabilities for dealing with email problems. Some are very competent and responsive. Others are not, or are even worse – indifferent to the problem. Most are somewhere in between these two extremes.