May 17 2009

Keeping it simple

If you don’t use e-mail forms on your site, but you want to present yourself as a company with several “departments”, you can do that without setting up separate POP accounts. Cpanel offers a handy feature which creates e-mail “forwarders”. What this does, as the name suggests, is that it forwards e-mail addresses to another standalone e-mail account.

This also comes in handy if you have employees or partners who have their own e-mail addresses. With forwarding, you can automatically forward e-mail messages sent to sales@yourdomain.com to several e-mail accounts. This allows you to have several e-mail addresses for your website which can then be forwarded to one person or several people, all without the need for creating individual POP accounts.

Another handy use for this feature is allowing people to send messages to your cell phone or BlackBerry without revealing your cell phone’s number or e-mail address. All you do is set up an alias, say mobile@yourdomain.com, which would then forward to your cell phone’s address (assigned through your carrier) without revealing that address to prying eyes.

To set up forwarders, simply go into your Cpanel account and click that option under the “E-mail” section of the control panel. Cpanel will walk you through the process, step by step, and within moments you’ll have aliases (or forwarders) set up.

Why do this over setting up POP accounts? Maybe you don’t want to hand out POP/SMTP accounts to everyone, but you still want them to be able to access website e-mail. By setting up forwarders, you can accomplish that, and you maintain the ability to remove or add people at will.