In my last post we learnt just how addicted the American’s are at checking their email. If the same can be said for New Zealanders, then the addiction must be good for business, right?

Sometimes your business or your job takes you away from the office – and even off the beaten track. Depending on your industry, it may be important for you to remain in contact with your customers and as we’ve already read, this might mean communicating during a vacation or outside of normal working hours.

The one tool I’ve found invaluable has been my handy WebMail interface. All our hosting accounts at Cheeky Monkey Hosting come with SquirrelMail as standard, and the application allows you to jump into an internet café or use any internet connected computer to access your mail on the run.

A couple of months ago I spent some time in South East Asia and as part of the work I was doing I was lucky enough to be carrying a BGAN satellite terminal. I had the perfect opportunity to try SquirrelMail when I was in a remote area with no broadband, no mobile coverage and no power! The goal was to put our WebMail offering and network to the test by connecting to our servers back home through an Inmarsat satellite. The biggest problem was finding some clear sky away from the tree line to point the dish eastwards toward the Pacific. SquirrelMail is a very lite application, in that it uses very little bandwidth – this makes it perfect for low speed internet connections. The last thing you want to be doing is loading numerous images, flash and java when you’re “on dialup” and paying by the megabyte!

The test was successful; it was slow going which was to be expected but I was able to send a message through to our Support Desk and receive a reply. It was pretty amazing knowing I’d connected wirelessly, on batteries, to our data centre back in Auckland through a satellite in orbit, some 36,000km above the earth.

As well as accessing email through a web interface, many savvy users will want to use a mobile device to retrieve messages. Web hosting plans should support both POP and IMAP protocol to allow users to access their mail on compatible mobile devices. But rather than having to constantly check mail via your mobile, there is a sneaky way to be alerted to urgent emails of importance via a text message.

Your mobile provider should provide a facility to link your mobile number with an email address, so when an email hits the linked address, a SMS is instantly triggered. This then allows business owners to only be disturbed for the important things – for example, you may wish to be alerted to a new order, a sale of a particular product or an urgent support request. So how can you be alerted for these things only?

Within your web hosting control panel you will need to create email aliases for each of the types of communications you expect to receive. This means a different email alias for each action – an email alias for where new sales are sent, an alias for critical support requests and aliases to receive non-urgent requests and so on. From here, with the help of your web host, you can pick out the specific aliases of choice and attach your mobile phone address. The result; when any of the high priority email aliases receive mail, they on forward it to both your inbox and your mobile phone.

This is a simple solution and allows you to remain in control of the rules you set up through your control panel – turning the triggers on and off as you wish. The reason I like the use of SMS over paging for urgent alerts is related to coverage. If you’re out of coverage when a pager message is sent then you’re out of luck, but for SMS, your provider will keep trying to push the message through until its expiry. You’ll appreciate this when you’re in rural parts of New Zealand, out on the water or if you travel a lot and are forced to turn your phone off.

A trap to be aware of when using multiple devices to check mail is to decide whether to “leave a copy of messages on the server” – this is a setting within your mail client. You don’t want to discover that you’re downloading the only copy of the message onto your mobile when you’d intended to reply to it from the office.