Email Hosting Definition

Email sustains your communication with your employees and clients, but it is always a soft target for cybercriminals. Cybercrimes such as social engineering and phishing put your company at risk. Email hosting definition operates through email servers.

Based on the 2017 Identity Fraud Study released by Javelin Strategy & Research, $16 billion was stolen from 15.4 million U.S. customers in 2016 alone. In that study, they also discovered that 51.9% of miscellaneous identity theft includes online shopping and payment account fraud, email and social media fraud, and medical services, insurance, and securities account fraud, and other identity theft. If you collect all the statistics and sum them up from the last six years, it gets worse. Identity thieves have stolen more than $107 billion.

Email Hosting Meaning and its Benefits

According to Technopedia, email hosting is a Web or Internet hosting service which rents out and operates email servers. Email hosting services are usually premium services which differ from the typical free webmail sites such as Yahoo and Google. These hosting providers cater to more demanding users like high-email-traffic small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that require their own domain name to better distinguish them. An example of that would be samsmith@petstore.com.

Aside from the distinct email address, there are other benefits from email hosting. Here is a quick list:

Adequate Storage Space

A robust amount of storage is needed for each mailbox created at the time you sign up for an email hosting account. This varies from one email hosting provider to another, but some give a certain amount of MB of storage, and some give a generous amount of GB per mailbox. In general, they will provide you with more than enough space to efficiently store tens of thousands of messages. A more flexible solution will allow you to easily upgrade as your storage needs increase. That’s a mark of a good email hosting service.

Shared Address Book

A uniform address book can help your employees send emails to accurate email addresses. This will lessen the occurrence of unwanted information leakage. The Address Book is a very useful feature in many email clients as it provides the user with a convenient way to store contact data for easy retrieval and use.

Spam and Virus Filtering

A quality email hosting providers provides efficient protection from harmful mail even before it reaches the network. Antivirus scanners are a part of the host’s SMTP gateways while spam is dealt with in various ways. A company that truly wants to help keep spam out your life will employ filtering methods such as blacklisting, whitelisting and greylisting, and also allow you to make configurations that will automatically send it to a quarantine folder instead of your inbox. If your email hosting service lacks this, you should look for a better provider.

Secure Webmail Access

All email hosting providers equip their mail servers with industry standard 128-bit encryption. It is active during the entire webmail session. This essentially means that any data sent to and from the server is encrypted from the moment you sign in until the time you sign out. With this proven security protocol, you are sure that your confidential messages will not be intercepted or compromised in any way.

Secure IMAP and POP Access

Email hosting solutions give businesses the ability to secure access to desktop email clients through IMAP or POP. All email traffic is encrypted together with the usernames and passwords sent from the email client to the mail server for authentication. A very good hosting provider will support all the popular mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Apple Mail. If you will be able to look for a hosting provider that supports Linux and BSD clients as well as PDAs and pocket PCs, that is even better. An email hosting plan can ensure IT systems safety.

The Email Security of thinkIT Solutions

If you are considering collaborating with an email hosting company, also consider the risk posed by cybercrime. Cybercriminals will attack any business they can find online. You need an email solution that allows you to send and receive files of any size without worrying every time you hit the send button or open a message.

thinkIT Solutions lets you communicate securely, efficiently and most importantly—with certainty. We will set up robust email systems and help you maximize your investment with the latest tools for streamlining communication and collaboration while keeping it tightly secured.

Make sure your definition of email hosting is a roust one with protection from thinkIT Solutions! Contact us right now for more information.