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We started a new Email List Tips blog late last week. So if you’re looking for advice on marketing through an email newsletter (or enews), check the new blog out.

Here’s a sample entry:

Here’s another quick tip for you. Your newsletter subscribers have to actually get something out of your newsletter. While you may be tempted to send out something that interests you, or perhaps company news, take a minute and make sure you’re writing about something your customers, clients and future customers and clients actually care about.

Not sure? Bounce it off a customer or client you already have. Find someone who knows you well enough to give you their honest opinion. Ask them if they think your subscribers will even care about it. Their honest answer will translate into dollars and cents.

Feel free to chime in over there and let us know what you’d like to hear about.

Oh, and happy Thanksgiving to all you eating turkey and such today!

One of the most difficult and annoying things to set up in a small business is email. There are so many different options that it can be frustrating to even attempt to configure email. What’s the difference between IMAP and POP3 anyways? I’ve seen people just type in their email address and it works. Why doesn’t mine work like that? I will attempt to answer some of those questions in this post.

There are three main email retrieval protocols in use:

• Exchange - This is a proprietary mail protocol used by Microsoft to receive email from an Exchange Server. Support for this protocol is heavily integrated into Outlook. It is the easiest to set up. Simply enter your email address and password and Outlook takes care of almost everything else for you. In addition to easy set up, the Exchange protocol allows an Outlook client to be connected constantly to the Exchange Server, so any email received by the server when almost instantly be sent to the user. This means that you will know you have an email the instant it has been received.
• IMAP - IMAP stands for “Internet Message Access Protocol.” It is very similar to the Exchange protocol, with the exception of the set up. It, like the Exchange protocol, allows messages to be retrieved the instant they are received, but it is harder to set up. In addition to email and password, you will need to know the mail server, your username to connect to the server, and whether or not the server uses SSL.
• POP3 - POP3 stands for “Post Office Protocol version 3.” It is very different from the other two. It requires just as much information to set up as IMAP, but it does not maintain an active connection to the server. Meaning that it only checks every few minutes to see if any new mail has been received. Another limitation of POP3 is that it doesn’t allow messages to be marked as read on the server. Meaning that if you check your email with an email client on one computer, read, and delete some email messages and then you check it using a different computer, you will have to go through the same messages you went through before. This is extremely annoying, even more so the more computers you check the email with. The one advantage to this is that every computer will always have every email you received.

The one problem with IMAP is that it every email that you delete is deleted from the server. Most people want to have one copy of every email they have received for reference. The problem is that many mailboxes limit the size of the mailbox so that once it is full they can no longer receive new messages (POP3 doesn’t have to worry about this, since most email clients are set to remove the message from the server after a few days). To get around this we need to have a way to move old email off the server and into a different folder. This can be done in almost every email client using offline folders. I will show you how to do it in Apple Mail.

The first thing you will need to do is create a folder to store the old messages. Click Mailbox -> New Mailbox… and add the mailbox to On My Mac. Once the mailbox has been added, create a rule (Preferences -> Rules -> Add Rule) that will move old mail into it when it was received or sent a certain number of days ago. Under “Perform the following actions” select that you want to move the message to your new folder.

This archiving method allows you to get all the advantages that come with IMAP (not having to delete every junk email from your work computer, home computer, and iPhone, individually) along with the advantages of POP3 (being able to keep all your email messages in case you need to reference them later). It also keeps the number of emails in your inbox way down, depending on how many days you choose to wait before archiving your messages.

If you own your own domain, you can set up any email address for that domain. If your name is John Doe and you own example.com, you can set up john@example.com, johndoe@example.com, contact@example.com, or anything you want, as long as it ends in your domain name.

If you’re like everyone else, you probably have some email address you’ve already been using for awhile. Two email addresses would just be a hassle. Fortunately, there are options.

1. You can take your new email address and just set it up so that all those emails forward to your preexisting address. The downside to this is that you’ll still be replying to emails from your old Yahoo, AOL or other email address, instead of the more professional looking address you just purchased.
2. Email everyone in your address book and let them know you’ve changed email addresses. Keep the old one open for a couple months and go through it every week or so to make sure you’re not missing anything. You may even be able to set it up forward to your new email address, though that depends on the company you were using.
3. Set up your email client (Outlook or whatever you use) to check both emails. The vast majority of email programs can be set up to check multiple email addresses.

I can’t emphasize how much more professional it is to use your email from your new domain for all business emails. Because of that, I recommend against option one, though I have had clients select that option.