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A lot of people seem to get very confused about how email works at first, so we often try to put things into perspective by comparing it to regular postal mail.
The ironic thing is that Postal Mail, like Email, is so reliable that once setup, very few people even give it a second thought.
Let us start off assuming you have two postal addresses, one for your home, and one for your business. We think this is a fair assumption considering you are almost certainly having your business website hosted with us.
Postal mail;
Letters addressed to your home address will not be delivered to your work address.
Letters addressed to your work address will not be delivered to your home address.
Email;
Emails addressed to your ISP assigned address will not get delivered to your
registered domain name address.
Emails addressed to your domain name address will not get delivered to your
ISP assigned Email address.
If you want to see what mail you received at home, you have to go home to get
it. (This is the equivalent of your ISP assigned email account)
If you want to see what mail you received at work you need to go to work to
get it. (This is the equivalent of the your.domain account).
In other words, to receive ALL mail, you need to go to two different and
independent mail boxes, regardless of whether we are talking Email or Postal
mail.
If you want to SEND a letter you don’t (usually) post it from your home or your work. You need to either go to the post office, or simply place it in the mail box nearest to where you are at any given time. With email, your nearest “post box” the ISP you are dialed/connected to.
Where you send the mail from doesn't have any connection with where you receive it.
Now, let us assume you post a letter, but forget to put a return address on it. When the person receives this letter and wants to send you a reply, where would they send it?
They *could* look at the postal stamp to find out that you posted it from (say) the Noarlunga Post Office, and send their reply to you there, and in theory, it will be held at that post office until such a time you turn up and identify yourself to retrieve it, or until it goes into the ‘dead letter’ pile; whichever comes first.
The same kind of thing will happen to email if you don't fill in the 'ReplyTo'
and/or 'From' fields in you Email settings. Replies will be sent to your
ISP (where it was posted from), which may not be want you want.
To solve this, you need to add the “reply” details to your envelope
and/or your letter before posting it. Same with email, you need
to add the return address details so people will send their replies to the
address that YOU specify.
The Email "From" address is equivalent of the address you write on the back of an envelope for Postal mail
The Email "ReplyTo" address is the equivalent of the address on
the letterhead or contained elsewhere in the letter you mailed.
Most times, these “From” and “Reply-To” addresses
will be the same, but it isn't inconceivable that you'll write a letter using
your business stationary (with your work address), but when you go to mail
this letter you may choose to put your home address on the back of the envelope.
This can be confusing for the SENDER, so it probably isn’t something
you would do on a regular basis.
Email really isn't anything different in this regard. You just need to set
things up so that people will reply to your *preferred* address rather than
letting them ‘guess’ which one to use.
You have Addresses where you have mail sent TO, you have ‘Accounts’ for where you pick mail up FROM.
Postal Mail:
Rather than having some of your postal mail delivered to your home address,
and other mail delivered to your work address, you might like to have ALL
your mail delivered to a single place - eg A PO BOX at Noarlunga.
How would you do this? First you'll have to get your PO box,
this will give you a THIRD postal mail address. The “problem” then
is how are you going to get EVERYONE to always send their mail to this new
post box? There are several ways. You can phone or mail everyone you
know at tell them to only use the PO Box (Not everyone is going to take note
of this though, and you are SURE to forget to inform someone), so now you
are going to have to check THREE places for your mail. All independent
of each other. Not exactly what you want.
Solution: You contact the post office nearest your home and you ask them
to FORWARD all of your postal mail (to your home address) to the PO box at
Noarlunga. You'll also need to do the same thing at the post office
near your work. Problem solved. Now it doesn't matter WHERE people
address your mail it will always end up at your PO Box at Noarlunga.
Sure, this is “complicated” to setup and organize because it
involved liaison with three different post offices, but you'll have achieved
your aim, all mail to all addresses into one mailbox and you don't even need
to tell anyone what your PO box number is; the post office(s) will forward
it to the PO Box, all you need to is pick it up from that mail box.
I’m sure that many people reading this document has already done something like this and never even considered it to be a “complex” task.
Email:
Your email, both to yourdomain.com and yourname@yourISP.com can
also be sent to a single mailbox, but you need to know what you want, and
then liaise with your ISP and web host in order to set things up.
Another example
A little less complex example would be to have all of your home postal mail
delivered to your work address, or, alternatively, all of your work postal
mail delivered to your home address.
The end result is the same, all of your mail will end up at the place YOU
specify, regardless of where it was addressed to. As before though,
this doesn't happen automatically, you have to setup for it. Obviously
it would be a BIG mistake to have your Home postal mail delivered to your
work address AND your work postal mail delivered to your home address. At
best, this would be a pointless thing to do, at worse, you'll not get any
mail, it'll simply get forwarded from one post office to the other - each
of them doing the forwarding you requested. Which in this silly example,
isn’t what you really wanted.
Email is exactly the same deal. You currently have a mailbox with your ISP,
and another mail box for emails to <someone>@yourdomain.com.
There is no reason why emails sent to yourname@yourISP.com can't be forwarded
on to <someone>@youdomain.com, and no reason why mail to <someone>@yourdomain.com
can't be forwarded to yourname@yourISP.com.
To do this though you need to tell the 'post office' that you want this done. We (vcsweb.com) are the equivalent of the post office nearest your work, and yourISP.com is the equivalent of the post office nearest your home.
Forwarding mail (postal or email) does have advantages and disadvantages
though.
The main advantage is that it lets you get all of your mail at a single place.
The disadvantages are
1) You need to organize for the forwarding to be done at the 'post office' - You can't just leave a note in your mailbox telling the posty to deliver it to an alternate address)
2) You need to choose your forwarding address wisely. Mail should be forwarded the address that is likely to change the least. IOW, with postal mail, if you happened to live in a caravan you wouldn't want your mail forwarded to a different caravan park every time you relocate, especially if you had a stable PO Box somewhere that you are able to have cleared on a regular (or semi regular) basis.
Same with email, it wouldn't be wise to have your yourdomain.com email forwarded to your ISP’s mailbox, because if you change ISP's you'll need to change all your mail forwarding to your new ISP. HOWEVER, since 'yourdomain.com' is not likely to change as often, it would be quite practical to have all your emails forwarded to this address, but you will still need set this up with each ISP you sign up with.
Unless you have a very specific need for mail forwarding it is generally best, and simplest, to not use it at all. After all, unlike Postal mail where you need to go to two physical locations to pick up mail, the Email system lets you do this without leaving your computer, even though the mail itself is still in two different physical locations.
As you can (hopefully) see, the sending and receiving mail, regardless of whether it is Email or Postal mail CAN be a very simple task that doesn’t take a great deal of thought, but the actual addressing and pickup requirements are very specific. It HAS to be that way.
The important thing to realize is that in all cases, the sending and receiving of mail are two totally separate issues, and need to be considered as such.
Very few people have a problem understanding this when it comes to postal mail, but when it comes to email, many people seem to think the same ‘settings’ will be suitable for both sending AND receiving, and get confused when things don’t work as they think it should.
This is further complicated, when they don’t realize that when they have their own ‘domain name’, this effectively becomes a secondary mail delivery address, much like a workplace postal address. Their ‘home’ address (or ISP provided Email address), is still a ‘valid’ delivery address, and this mailbox/account still needs to be checked on a regular basis.
