Karthik Balachander
Webnames’ Email Hosting has always offered a reliable, secure and feature rich way to help businesses and individuals use branded email on their domain names. As part of our continual efforts to improve our email services, we have now made Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync available as an option for all your email accounts, at no additional fee. Read on to learn more about what this means for you, and how you can activate Activesync on email.
Must-have features of Business Email
An email name such as yourname@yourbiz.ca adds a dash of professionalism and credibility that can make all the difference on your business card or on your website, when the competition is as fierce as it is these days.
Whether you have the time and the resources to invest in building a website, you should absolutely register your domain name and get your own professional email address first. You can use this address as a simple forwarder or alias to your favourite free email provider such as Gmail or Yahoo, if you so choose. Hence basic features such as email forwarding (or email channeling as it’s sometimes called) and adequate storage space are pretty much a given in any business email solution.
Since the advent of the internet, a variety of methods to use it as a communication method have come and gone, but email has endured. Whether it is IRC Chat, instant messengers such as AOL and Yahoo Messenger or the modern video-enabled tools such as Zoom or Skype, they have all been co-opted for business and personal use, but none of them has completely usurped the role of email as a means of communication – both formal and informal.
Email for Business has succeeded because of its adaptability – Email has embraced technological developments to improve its security features, it has seamlessly gone mobile with protocols such as POP, IMAP etc. and is reliably platform independent regardless of Apple, Windows, Android, Linux etc.
Here is a list of features that your business email solution must provide:
- Support for a wide variety of email clients: Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail etc.
- Collaboration tools such as Shared Calendars, Tasks, Contacts, Notes etc.
- Seamless mobile and cross-device connectivity through POP3, IMAP, ActiveSync etc.
- An intuitive and feature-rich webmail solution
- Reliable service with over 99.99% uptime guarantee
- Robust anti-spam and antivirus protection
- Quality support from experts in Email Hosting
- Top notch security and privacy (if you are Canadian, we recommend choosing a provider that stores your emails and data within Canada, as laws here offer more safeguards than elsewhere)
Our latest upgrade to Business Email (adding ActiveSync option to all accounts) ensures that Webnames.ca’s email solutions remain among the very best in fulfilling each of the above needs.
What is Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync aka AirSync?
ActiveSync is a data synchronization method for email developed by Microsoft, it helps your email client transmit and receive email, contacts, tasks, notes, calendars etc. from the servers of your business email host.
You can access your email in a variety of different ways – it can be through your browser through webmail (many popular free email services use this), or you may be an email client such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, Windows Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird.
An email client requires a way to connect to your email servers, commonly known as a protocol. POP3 and IMAP are two popular protocols used for email connections on both computers and mobile devices but both these options sync only email. Mobile devices often have their own email clients although they often use the same methods to connect to email servers as desktop email clients.
POP vs. IMAP vs. ActiveSync
POP (PostOffice Protocol) is the oldest of these three and it essentially downloads and saves a local copy of all your email. Any new emails you draft, and actions such as deletion or marking an item as read happens locally on your device. POP allows for you to keep or delete the emails from your mail server after it has been downloaded to your device. Some of these features make POP unwieldy if you access a single email account through multiple devices, since they may not all be in sync.
IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is better suited to mobile devices and a multi-device experience since it downloads and caches only a small portion of your email folders locally. Hence all your email is accessible on the servers and can be backed up securely by your provider at all points. It is also faster since emails are frequently downloaded on an as needed basis.
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync also known as AirSync is not exactly a like-for-like replacement for POP or IMAP, because it deals with more than just email. ActiveSync helps you keep all your devices updated, in almost real-time with your other data such as calendars, contacts etc.
ActiveSync on Webnames Business Email
ActiveSync has been available as an optional add-on on our Business Email for a few years now but starting Jun 1, 2020 we have made it available for free on all our Business Email plans. We find that Exchange ActiveSync gives a great productivity boost for most businesses and strongly recommend that you switch to it. We’ve also expanded the storage options on email with a new 30 GB plan.
You can buy Business Email at a 25% discount, starting June 9, 2020 until July 10, 2020. Buy Business Email and boost your brand with professional email solutions right away!
Need help activating ActiveSync? Here’s our easy guide for setting up ActiveSync on Desktop.