The other day, I had a guy do some yard work for me. He seemed to be a recent immigrant and spoke little English. But he did a very good job at a very reasonable price. Naturally, I wanted to know how I could get hold of him again if I had things to be done around the yard. I expected him to give me a telephone number. Instead, he gave me his e-mail address. This guy did not have an office or a telephone; he conducted his business simply with an e-mail address.

“Where do you check your e-mail?” I was curious.

“Library,” he said.

Despite their ubiquity, all e-mail services are not equal. This week’s column will help you choose the right one for your small business.

If you want a free e-mail address, you can get one from a service like Yahoo, Hotmail, or Google. Yes, you have to put up with the advertisements, but the services are free, they seldom go down, and they do a good job of filtering spam and viruses. Just a few years ago, all you got was 10MB of storage space for your mail, but these days, most services give you a 2GB storage space which is ample for most people. But these mail services have two drawbacks. First, they hand out webmail addresses. With webmail, your mail remains on the server and you can only access it via a web browser – it is not available to you offline. You can’t use an e-mail client to connect your mailbox and download your mail. Second, you don’t have the exclusivity of your own domain name. To many, handing out an e-mail address such as me273@yahoo.com is like scribbling your name on a yellow Post-It when asked for a business card; me@mycompany.com is a lot more appealing.

If you want a custom domain name for your e-mail, so that you can have an address like me@mycompany.com, you need your own e-mail server. The term “server” is somewhat confusing. It applies both to the software that processes your e-mail and to the hardware that the software runs on. Unless you want to host your own server – an option we will not consider here – you should think of a server merely as the software that processes and routes your mail. Just as your desktop can simultaneously run several copies of a software program like Internet Explorer, a physical server can run several copies of a mail server program – each for a different domain.

Typically hosting service providers host, run, and maintain these servers for you. They host thousands of mail servers on a single physical server. People refer to such servers as “shared servers”. Naturally, it costs hosting service providers very little to run one for you. In fact, most hosting service providers will throw in a free mail server along with a few e-mail addresses, if you host your web site with them.

You can create e-mail aliases and forward your mail with these servers. An alias is an e-mail address like support@mycompany.com or sales@mycompany.com, which does not have its own mailbox. It is just another name for your address, me@mycompany.com. All mail sent to these addresses ends up in your mailbox. People like aliases because aliases make their outfit look bigger that it really is. Mail forwarding allows you to configure a mail box so that all mail coming to it is automatically sent to another mailbox.