Take Control of Your Domain! Part III
This is the third part in a short series about how to make sure you are master of your domain.
Take Control of Your Domain - Part I
Take Control of Your Domain - Part II
Your e-mail addresses associated with your domain (address@whatever.com) can be “hosted” wherever. Many people use their host provider to also provide e-mail services. It’s probably the easiest way. Some people use an outside service. Although your e-mail is tied to your domain name, it is not required to go through the same server for the host or domain.
Remember “back in the day” when everyone was circulating those e-mails about how people were trying to pass laws that would make e-mail not be free anymore? Well, that really happened … sort of.
A Bit about E-mail Relays
E-mails can be sent several different ways. Every time you send an email - you use what is called a “relay.” This relay is basically the process of relaying your message to the appropriate places to get it to the destination address. If you put two people on your email as recipients, well then you are using two relays.
In the good old days, you could send as many e-mails as you wanted to and there was no end to your happiness and joy as you spread your words around the world. Unfortunately, for a myriad of reasons, greed, spammers, structure and [your favorite reason here], relays are now mostly limited. Servers that have open relays are blackballed by servers who don’t so even if you have a server with open relays, your mail might not get through. We all suffer oh I mean stick together on this as mail hosts.
Most hosting companies put a 250-500 limit per day on your email account. So if you have a lot of friends, or maybe just a lot of time, you’re pretty much out of luck.
Some hosts - let’s use GoDaddy as an example, like to charge for extra relays. Pay only $3 a month for 50 extra relays. Seems like it might be pretty cheap, however, if you run a subscriber-only newsletter and it has 800 subscribers, you better not be giving your newsletter away for free, because you’ll be paying and extra $33 a month for your relays. This is probably about 5 times what you pay for your hosting with Go Daddy. In my educated opinion, this is an egregious charge.
BUT!! There are options!! You can use a service called authsmtp (one I have been using for more than one year now, and have been VERY pleased with) to purchase more relays so you can send out your newsletter. Not only are the relays relatively inexpensive ($168 per year for 10,000 relays a month), but their IP addresses are clean and your email won’t be blocked as spam very often. They keep a tight reign on spam and if you use underhanded spammy black hat techniques to send out your e-mails, you will quickly be booted as a client.
Unfortunately, for Go Daddy clients, you can’t use authSMTP, because Go Daddy won’t open up the port for you to connect to an outside service. Why? I believe it is because they want your money for the relays that should really be free anyway [and of course, they do bulk business. If you get special treatment, even if it's valid, that's not bulk business practice].
We used to host all our sites with GoDaddy — but because of the relay issue, and other restrictions we host with Site5.com — a budding hosting company with just about the best reseller plan out there. And although they don’t have a 24 hour help line like GoDaddy, the service we receive is much more personalized than anything I have experienced before.
MX Records
MX Records are the part of the DNS records (referenced in Part II of this series). When you decide where you’re going to host your email - you will adjust your MX records accordingly. Many people just use their host’s e-mail offerings like Go Daddy, or Site5 - where you don’t have to do anything special with your MX records, you just follow the instructions from the host to know where to check your email.
Some places we have used for our clients:
- Go Daddy
- Site 5
- Mailstreet.com
- Google Apps for Your Domains
Each of these provide instruction for how to update your MX records to point to their mail servers. If you are not techie oriented, you should not be updating your DNS records — especially if you are counting on getting your email, or having your site be up and running. If you have a “practice” site, and you really want to learn, I recommend you do everything with that practice site until you get the hang of it.
A Final Thought About DNS Records Access
Wherever the nameservers are pointed — that is the place where you will change your DNS records, MX records included. The nameservers are what designate the physical hosting “place” for your web files. For instance, you could have your domain registered at GoDaddy, your site hosted at Site5, and your email hosted by MailStreet. In order to change your MX records for this example, you would have to change them at Site5 to point to MailStreet.
That’s all I can think of right now for understanding email and it’s connection with your domain.
Just my 2¢ anyway!
© 2008 Jennifer Poyer