Making sure you get all your business emails

02/19/2014

Nothing is more frustrating than waiting for that urgent e-mail, pressing send and receive and nothing happens.

Email problems can roughly be divided into 3 major problematic areas:

  • technical problems with your mail server (rare)
  • problems on your mail client’s computer (very common)
  • a lack of organising when it comes to mail (fairly common)

To understand the above, one needs to understand how an e-mail goes from one person to another:

Senders mail client -> Senders mail server -> Recipient mail server -> Recipient mail client

and for a response, the reverse:

The recipient responds via mail client -> Recipient mail server receives a response -> Sends on the original sender mail server -> Sends on to original sender mail client

At any one of the abovementioned points, something can go wrong.  Here’s a list of common problems that we’ve found people to experience:

  • Sender or recipient has antivirus software that interferes with the normal operation of their mail client (Outlook).
  • Attachments sent or received are too big for the mail server to deal with.
  • Sender or recipient has internet connectivity issues which lead to the mail client struggling to complete sending and receiving.
  • Mail disappears in between thousands of mail in the inbox.
  • Mail ends up in a spam folder on either the server of the mail client or the server of the recipient mail client.

To solve some of the above mentioned we recommend that you:

  • Ensure that you have only one spam filter in operation, either on your computer or on the server, but not on both.
  • Make sure that your mail provider can deal with large attachments, typically bigger than 20Mb.
  • If your internet loses connectivity, your email will lose connectivity as well, so consider switching provider or get a different method of connecting.
  • If you have 10000 emails in your Inbox, it’s probably time to start thinking about organising them.  Use folders and rules to automatically categorise emails.  Use descriptive subject lines as this will make finding that email in the future a lot easier when searching for it.  Unsubscribe from newsletters that you never read.
  • Check your mail client for mail but also login to your webmail to check your spam folder.  Disable the spam filter on your mail client, as having 2 spam filters will just increase your chances of mail accidentally disappearing from your inbox.

Drop us a line if you’d like to chat with us about a mail solution best suited for your business.

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