I hope that title is self explanatory. It's certainly one more extension of the fully integrated sales approach and does marry well with the purchase of Domain and coming eComm services.

I would suggest an integrated HTML page for Store and possible POP3 and IMAP support from Outlook Express or other desktop products.

Now why do I think this one is possibly already in the works?

Danno

What we do now is let you set up email addresses and forward them to your normal email address. Then programs like Outlook express let you set up accounts.

So what you would do is set your email address as:

sales@mydomain.com to forward to say your normal email address: you@yourdslcompany.com

Then in Outlook express use a filter to put all emails sent to that address into a folder. From there you create an account in Outlook and when you reply to those emails choose your sales@mydomain.com account to reply from and your customers will receive emails that appear to be from your email at your domain.

Most people dont want to have any more email addresses than they already have so this solution works pretty well and doesn't require anyone to learn a new email system since they can just forward all emails for their domain to their own normal email address.

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for responding so quickly. I don't think I've seen this method mentioned before, but it sounds interesting.

Is the method you outlined automatically made available to the customer at purchase of the Domain name, or is a Support Case request (or other method) needed to implement?

If it's automatic, is it to the email address of record in the profile settings, or other?

If I wanted to operate with multiple mailbox addresses, e.g. sales@, returns@, danno@ do those all need to be provided at setup, or is the forward automatic for any recipient mailbox name at the domain name to the one forwarded mail address?

Are there any negatives/cons to the method you outlined and is it currently being used by customers of the Domain name service? Any implementation problems, like limitations in sending responses (via Outlook) as the origin domain; as I was under the impression some services filtered or rejected foreign domain (anti-spam).

My Thoughts: Generally, businesses want to avoid the stigma of the free email address (HOTMAIL, YAHOO, GMAIL, AOL) by using the @domain they've registered. Most of the hosting services with a registered domain bundle email service, so I made the suggestion on that basis (and especially due to planned services). Free email services from the large providers are also less than reliable for business (no slight meant to Auctiva's free services), so a reliable hosted mail service is preferable over forward to a less than reliable service (which is a technical con).

Danno