If you operate a mail server in your office — for example, if you have an Exchange server — ask your friendly IT technician if you have backup mail servers in place.

Commonly, a mail server is set up in an office, but if that server goes down (loses power, loses internet connectivity, etc.,) emails sent to that server will start bouncing back at the sender. The longer your server is down, the more likely the emails will bounce back.

This is rather unprofessional, but the easy answer is to configure backup mailservers. Usually, your Internet Service Provider or your web hosting company will allow you to use their mail servers at no additional cost. The backup mail servers will keep trying to forward emails through to your on-site mail server, and will buy you more time before emails are bounced back.

Occasionally you will receive a spam email that appears to be sent from yourself, or a bounce email suggesting you sent a spam email to someone else. Although disconcerting, usually you needn’t be concerned about this.

When you send an email, you can make the From: address anything you like, and there are many legitimate reasons for why you might do this.

Spammers, as you would expect, do not use their own email address in the From: field. Instead, they will either use a random email address from the list of email addresses they intend to spam, or they will use the recipient’s own email address in order to confuse the recipient.

It should be noted that certain viruses can cause your computer to send spam emails, so having up-to-date antivirus software installed is always important.

We all receive spam, although it is interesting to see what constitutes “heaps” of spam amongst different people. For some, that might be 10 spam emails per day; for others, that might be 1000. Certainly, the longer your website has been around and the more popular it becomes, the more spam you will receive through email addresses referenced on the website, as well as email addresses that spammers guess based on your domain name.

Here are some tips for reducing and managing the spam you receive:

• Prevent a large amount of spam by never using your primary email address when signup up for websites, posting on discussion forums, etc. Create a second email account for this purpose; this way, you can easily filter those emails into a separate folder, or delete the account entirely.
• Only display generic email addresses, such as info@, on your website; reserve name-based email address, such as john@, to internal and direct communication. This helps reduce spam being sent to your day-to-day email address.
• Ask your web hosting company what spam prevention or tagging systems they have in place, and learn how to use them effectively. For example, you might be able to nominate a threshold at which suspicious emails are deleted, or have emails tagged as potential spam, or have suspicious emails forwarded to separate email account that you check less frequently.
• Learn how to use email filters (or rules) in your email program. If your web host uses software such as SpamAssassin, you can create an email filter that moves emails with a particular spam “score” to different folders. This allows you to keep your inbox clean, and you can check your spam folders once a day or once a week.
• Never respond to spam (by return email, by clicking a link, or by sending a read receipt.) A response tells the sender they have found a valid email address, and will simply send you more spam.

By understanding spam and utilising the tools available to you, spam can be transformed from a serious time waster to a mere annoyance.

It is important to consider early on a strategy for what format your company’s staff email addresses will take. Your final decision will depend on the number of employees and how you expect this to grow throughout the life of your business.

• If you do not plan to employ more than 5 staff, it is acceptable to have firstname-only email addresses, such as david@example.com. The chance of having two identical first names is relatively low, and with the size of the business, you can append an initial if needed.
• For 5-20 staff, you might choose a firstname/surname initial format, such as davidj@example.com, or use the full firstname/surname approach, such as davidjohnson@example.com or david.johnson@example.com.
• For 20-200 staff, always prefer davidjohnson@example.com or david.johnson@example.com.
• For more than 200 staff, consider dividing email addresses across departments, such as david.johnson@hr.example.com.

For smaller staff numbers, also consider the benefits of creating email aliases for misspellings of staff names, and shortcut names using people’s initials for internal use (e.g. dtj@example.com).

Beyond staff email addresses, you should also get into the habit of utilising department-specific email addresses (which can simply forward to the relevant person(s) in the company.) Examples include accounts@, sales@, support@, hr@, complaints@, privacy@ and jobs@. This way, you can easily delegate work from one staff member to another by simply changing the recipient of the forwarder. This is beneficial both to smaller businesses, which share the load among few staff, and larger businesses, which need continuity over staff transition.

1. Add a one-line summary of your business to your email signature. The person you sent the email will already know exactly what you do, but the colleague to whom she forwarded that email might not.

2. If you send HTML email and your email signature or stationery is rich HTML, sign up for (at the very least) a Hotmail and Gmail account and send yourself a test email so you can be sure your pretty signature doesn’t fall into a messy heap on those email clients. Find someone who has the opposite platform (Windows/Macintosh) to you, and send them a test email, too.

3. Don’t allow each of your staff to choose a different font for their name that matches their personality. Please, don’t.