With so many e-mail technologies available, deciding what's right for your business can seem a little daunting. This guide is designed to take the mystery out of e-mail and help you make the right choices for your business.

For simplicity we can break down the various choices in to three categories. ISP (Internet Service Provider) Hosted services, such as POP3 and IMAP; web based e-mail services, such as Hotmail and Yahoo; and business server based email, such as Exchange.

ISP Hosted Services

POP3

The most popular forms of hosted e-mail are POP3 and IMAP and both relay on using your ISP's server to send and receive e-mail on your behalf. Mail for an intended recipient is delivered first to the senders ISP, then to the recipients ISP where it is queued until it is downloaded using a mail client such as Outlook.

With a POP3 system, mail is downloaded by the client and stored on the hard drive of their local PC before being deleted off the ISP's server. The ISP's mail server is therefore only a temporary store for email where mail resides between connection attempts.

POP3 is useful for smaller businesses with one or two computers as it is very cheap to implement and requires no specialist hardware. The hard work is performed by the ISP's servers so the user only requires an e-mail client, such as Outlook or one of the many free clients available, and an e-mail account, many of which are again provided free.

POP3 does, however, have some serious limitations which make it unsuitable for all but the smallest businesses. Because e-mail is deleted off the server after it is downloaded, e-mails become compartmentalised on the users computer. A company with 10 employees, each with their own PC, would end up with e-mails spread over all 10 computers. This presents difficulties if e-mail needs backing up or shared between users as there is no way to centrally manage those e-mail stores.

To add to the problem users can only read their downloaded e-mails from the PC which originally downloaded them. To illustrate this lets imagine a user who uses Outlook to download their e-mails to a work PC. Once downloaded the e-mails reside solely on the hard drive of the work PC and are no longer available from any other computer. If the user goes home and wants to refer back to an old e-mail they have no way to download and read those messages again.

IMAP

IMAP gets round some of the issues of POP3 by changing the way e-mail is downloaded from the server to the client PC. With IMAP e-mails are not deleted off the server once they are downloaded but are simply mirrored on the client PC. Because the server maintains a full copy of all mail sent to the user that mail can be downloaded to multiple locations. A a user can then have access to their mail from both their work PC, a PC at home and any number of other locations.

Whilst this seems to solve many of the issues with POP3; IMAP has failed to make a massive impression on business users. As we will see later in the article, a dedicated business e-mail server offers a massive range of additional collaboration, communication and security features which modern businesses rely heavily upon aside from e-mail alone.

Web Mail

Web mail services have been popularised in recent years by companies such as Yahoo and Hotmail who offer free web mail to internet users. Web mail is any service that lets you send and receive mail from a www based internet site using a browser such as Internet Explorer.

Web mail has many benefits and lets you send and receive mails from any computer as well as storing your received mails for access later. The greatest benefit of web mail is it requires no pre-configuration to access e-mails. Any computer with a web browser can send and receive mail meaning e-mail can be accessed from work, home, internet cafes or hotels with almost no limitations.

Whilst web mail systems do have many benefits, and are now very popular with home users, they are not really all that suitable as the main e-mail system within a business. The main problems with web mail is the lack of collaborative or integrative features and the relatively clunky way they operate. Businesses use tools like Outlook to manage calendars, organise meetings, share e-mail, sync tasks to PDAs and a vast array of other important business functions. These rely heavily on a well designed e-mail infrastructure and these simply can't be replicated with a web mail system.

Web mail is also generally slower than a dedicated mail application, such as Outlook, and as such are usually seen alongside other mail systems as an adjunct rather than a complete replacement.

Exchange and other server based e-mail systems

By far the most popular form of e-mail for business, for good reason, are server based systems such as Exchange. Exchange replaces the need for an ISP to send mail on your behalf and brings all the e-mail routing, delivery and storage in to the business itself.

Probably the biggest reason for the ubiquity of integrated communications systems such as Exchange is their ability to scale with the business. The server side component of systems like POP3 and IMAP is often controlled via a central control panel but setting up the client package (Outlook) must be done individually at each users computer. Even a small business with 10 users would quickly find this difficult to manage as users join and leave the company and any changes to the server could would require an administrator to manually change each of the 10 computers. With this scaled to 100 users the task would become unimaginably complicated and time consuming.

Even so, if looked at purely on the basis of e-mail alone, systems such as Exchange might not make much financial sense to smaller businesses were it not for the vast range of other features they offer. Systems such as Exchange must be viewed as complete communications and collaboration packages rather than simply tools to send and receive e-mail. For instance, Exchange offers the following benefits:

• The ability to store calendar, contact and task information and to share that information with other users in the company. If desired, users can view each others diaries or maintain a group calendar to schedule business appointments.

• The ability to maintain a company wide business address book, which can be added to and viewed by all people within an organisation, or department address books, which can be viewed by only those in specific departments or groups. This is fully granular meaning access can be given to as few or as many people as desired.

• The ability to view other users e-mail mailboxes and to send mail on behalf of other other users. Again, this is fully granular meaning security is guaranteed where it's needed!

• The ability to store e-mails in public folders so they can be viewed by all users within an organisation or department.

• The ability to synchronise e-mail, tasks and appointments with a PDA or other mobile device; often seamlessly across the internet without even connecting the mobile device to a computer.

• The ability to setup and configure multiple e-mail addresses for users in seconds.

Coupled with these obvious benefits to the end user, a system such as Exchange massively simplifies the job of the system administrator. All mail, contact and diary information is stored in a single location meaning backup and security are a simple procedure. Much of the day to day administration is automated by the server and making changes is relatively straight forward as the administrator has a single point of contact through which all changes can be made. This reduces downtime, increases security and improves end user productivity.

And the best bit is....

Microsoft's e-mail server implementation is called Exchange and provides all these features and more in the worlds best selling business e-mail package. With a package such as small business server, Exchange is effectively free if you compare it against purchasing Windows Server and Exchange separately. This means you can benefit from all the features of a company e-mail system without the costs you might expect.

If you'd like more information on Exchange, Small Business Server or any other Microsoft products, please call us on 0845 2340580.