Email And The Entrepreneur And Start Up Company

If you are a non-entrepreneur Gen Y like my son, you probably see email as antiquated at floppy disks.  For him, email has been replaced by social media, instant messaging and texting.

However…

If you are like me, and most other entrepreneurs, who run start up and emerging companies, you heavily depend on email.

So, what do you do in this spam and virus infected world to protect you and your company’s email?

Spam Reduction

For me, I don’t want to lose emails or their attachments – or inadvertently filter out client or prospective client emails. 

I still use an old Pop3 client called Eudora which isn’t even supported any more (one of these days, I’ll find the time to upgrade this.)  I also use a front-end spam filter called Mail Washer Pro which is excellent at filtering out the more than 2,000 spam emails I get every day.  Mail Washer does a great job – but sometimes, it treats an email from a prospective client as spam which means that I might not even get it.

For me, I use two solutions that might make sense for you and your company. too.

The first is that I am now using one of those annoying contact forms on this web site.  I know a lot of us hate filling these things out – but it solves the problem of new prospects getting caught in the spam filter.  Everything that comes from my web site contact form is marked as a “Friend” which means that I see it.  Once I start working with a new client, I mark their direct emails as Friends also – which means that problem solved – until they use yet another email address and catch me, and Mail Washer, off guard. 

But, for the most part, this is the best approach I’ve seen…and it avoids those spam trap opt in forms that are generally a complete turn off to friends and prospects alike.

 Automatic Email Backup Protection

Since I use a Pop3 email client fed by my hosting company, automatic email backup protection was easy.  There is a California start up company that offers this automatic email backup protection service for free: G o o g l e.

Many of you probably already have a Gmail account for home, personal or other reasons.  Many of you may use them as your primary work and start up company email address.  I personally don’t trust online storage of all my emails when you never know what might happen that inadvertently closes your account and you have lost everything.  Also, if you have employees, you want control of their company email account if they quit or if they are fired.  For those reasons, and others, I don’t choose to use Google or any other web resident email account as my main conduit to the world.

However, I do trust Google as a back up.

I use one of my Google Gmail accounts strictly as a back up for ALL 13 of my domain named email accounts. 

I simply go into my hosting account (I use Host Gator) and create a forwarded copy of ALL my received emails to send to this one backup collection account.  It took me less than five minutes to forward a copy of all email from all accounts to my new Google Gmail account.

Google gives you a massive amount of storage for all the emails and attachments that you get.  They even do a great job of separating out the spam.  This approach also gives me a way to view all my email accounts under one email roof when I’m using my mobile devices. Plus, I have a copy of all emails and all versions of documents sent to me.  If you wanted to back up all emails that you send, you could set up your mail client to automatically BCC all emails you send so that they also get backed up on your special Gmail account.

Check with your hosting account and see if they support duplicate forwarding of your company’s email.  If so, Google is waiting to solve your email backup problems for free.