If you've only used free email services like Hotmail, AOL, or Gmail, chances are you don’t have much experience with a hosted SMTP server. The email needs of a large-scale business may overshadow a small business or personal account, so using generic email providers may not be the best option. This is especially the case if you have lots of outgoing email traffic.
Why Would My Business Want a Hosted Email Server?
If you were wondering what is SMTP, hosted email simply consists of protocols and every (POP3/IMAP) and sending (SMTP) requires servers to do anything. There are also relay servers and forwarding servers when talking about more large-scale email setups.
When using email hosted services like Gmail, those are also hosted on servers, albeit being shared with tons of other users. When on your own dedicated server, you will only be sharing bandwidth and storage with other users. While there is a perceived security benefit to that, Google does a seriously good job at protecting their hosted SMTP servers.
Using relay services with your SMTP email hosting is highly useful if you need to send out critical bulk emails. This could include newsletters for customers or employees, email confirmations, order information or payment reminders. If your bulk email needs have quite a high resource requirement, you should definitely do your homework on the top ranking SMTP hosting companies.
Hosting your own outgoing mail server does have it’s hurdles to overcome, costing manpower for troubleshooting, keeping on top of Spam filtering and making sure configurations are always correct. It is extremely important to make sure an IT professional configures your DNS records properly to avoid getting on a DNSBL blacklist. These issues can be mitigated by using email hosting by Duocircle, which have their own support staff on-hand.
Switching to a Professionally Hosted Business Email
Let’s say you have a Gmail account and you want to move things over to your business’s domain to make things look better. Moving over your MX records correctly, including your POP and hosted SMTP servers, is obviously the most critical step to establishing a hosted business email.
Aside from that, you will want to backup your contacts to your new email software (which may be something like Roundcube or Horde). You will also likely want to set up a forwarder from any old email accounts to direct to your new domain.
If your outgoing email needs are quite light compared to incoming traffic, you may just go ahead and use Gmail over a hosted SMTP. Be sure to check out this guide on using Google SMPTP with your setup.
Final Thoughts
Hosted SMTP servers are not for everyone, which is why mainstream free and premium email services are so popular. When talking about just SMTP, you need to evaluate the outgoing mail needs for your company. Aside from performance, you also need a reliable host to take care of any security flaws to prevent SPAM from being sent out from your domain.