Most conservation organizations now have at least one organizational email account, and most have found that access to email has significantly enhanced their ability to collaborate and communicate with their boards, their members, and their peer groups.

Imagine if your office had a single telephone, and that people who wanted to make calls had to get up from their desk, walk over to the phone, and maybe even wait for it to be free before they could make a call. It would be awfully hard to tap the power of the telephone as a communications tool, right? Yet this is how too many organizations are still using email.

We believe that in order for conservation organizations to be able to harness the power of email in their work, email must be accessible to each person in your organization--at their own desk. If using email is a break in a person's routine, or an interruption to their work, it will simply not get used as much or as effectively as it could.

We recommend that every conservation organization take the steps necessary to provide each of their staff members with desktop access to their own individual email account. This includes support staff, as well as full-time program staff--most organizations have found that intra-organizational email is a powerful and efficient tool for sharing information, even within a single office. (It's also very important to help your board members get on email.)

Prerequisites

In order to provide each person with desktop access to their own individual email account, there are several pieces of infrastructure that you'll need to have in place.

Access to the Internet for each staff person

In order to send and receive email, each person's computer must be able to access the Internet. This doesn't mean providing a modem and phone line for each machine--there are much more cost-effective ways to get everyone in your organization online with a single shared Internet connection.

A POP email client

Once connected to the Internet, each of your computers must have email software installed on it.

Strongly recommended: your own domain name

We strongly recommend establishing an Internet domain name for your organization. A domain name is the part of the email address after the "@" symbol, or the part of the Web address after the "www.". (E.g. ONE/Northwest's domain name is "onenw.org," allowing us to have email addresses such as "stevea@onenw.org" and a Web address of "www.onenw.org." While not essential to providing an email account for each of your staff members, registering a domain name makes is easy to establish a simple, consistent, and permanent online identity for your organization.

Suggestions for establishing email accounts

We recommend that you establish one email account for each staff member in your organization.If you've registered a domain name, firstname@yourgroup.org is a good standard for naming accounts. Be consistent the way you name accounts so that your email addresses are logical and easy to remember.

We also recommend setting up a general email address for your group. It's handy to have a general email address to put on letterhead, on your Web site, in publications, etc., rather than use the email of a particular person. The address info@yourgroup.org is the standard for general email addresses. It is usually possible to set this up as an "alias" that forwards to one or more people, so you don't have to check a separate mail account to get general mail.

If appropriate, you also might want to establish additional "general" email aliases for major program areas.

Ways to provide individual email accounts

There are at least four ways to provide each person in your organization with an email account. Each has different costs, advantages, and disadvantages, and each may be appropriate for different types of organizations.

1) Add additional email accounts from your current Internet service provider

Every dialup Internet account comes with one email account, and many ISPs now offer the option to add additional accounts, usually for a fee of $3-5 per month per mailbox. Some Internet service plans include multiple email accounts--typically 2-5. If your organization is small, this may be enough.

Advantages

• May be relatively easy--depending on the quality of your ISPs customer support.
• No additional companies to deal with.

Disadvantages

• Most ISPs charge about $5/month per additional mailbox; this can add up quickly if you have more than 3-4 staff members.
• Some ISPs cannot host email accounts under your a domain name (i.e. your-organization.org)--and others can, but will only do it as part of an expensive Web & email hosting package.

Contact: your Internet Service Provider for more information on establishing additional email accounts.

2) Free email services

In the past few years, dozens of companies have sprung up that offering free email accounts. There are several different types of free email services. Among the most popular are "web-based email' services, which are designed to allow users to send and receive email by visiting their Web site. HotMail is perhaps the best known example of this type of free email service.

Web-based email services are usually not the best choice for everyday email users; their browser-based user interfaces usually offer only rudimentary mail-handling commands, and because everything takes place over the Web, you must be actively online to compose or browse through your old email. Storage space for email is usually very limited as well.

There are a number of companies offering free POP email accounts, which are the standard type of email account that all ISPs offer. These are less common than web-based free email providers, but because they are standard POP email accounts that can be checked with any email program, they may be a viable choice for conservation activists who can't afford another alternative.

Advantages

• Cheap

Disadvantages

• You'll have to have an email address under their domain name of the free POP email provider (e.g.,. user@hotpop.com).
• Free email providers are often small companies that may come and go with little warning.
• Customer support may be limited or nonexistent. (You get what you pay for.)
• Free POP email providers typically limit the amount of mail that can accumulate before you download it to several megabytes. Many also limit the size of file attachments you can receive.
• To protect against abuse by spammers, many free POP email providers do not offer outbound email servers, meaning that you may need to use your ISP's mail server for sending mail. This is a possible source of configuration confusion, but usually solvable.
• Many free services are advertising supported; this can be annoying at best and intrusive at worst.

3) Combine web and email hosting services under your own domain name from a specialized web/email hosting provider, not your ISP

Many organizations have now registered Internet domain names (e.g. onenw.org, ibm.com, etc.) which give them a unique and consistent online identity. We strongly recommend registering your own domain, as it gives you a permanent online identity that you can keep even if you change service providers in the future. Email addresses of the form user@yourgroup.org are much easier to remember, and having your own domain makes you look more professional online.

Many ISPs provide domain-hosting services, but they are not usually particularly good values. There are now many companies that provide only web and email hosting services, typically at a lower cost and a higher service level than ISPs that primarily offer dialup services.

If you're ready to update and consolidate your web and email services under a domain name, moving the whole deal to a specialized web/email hosting provider is probably a cost-effective move. (You'll can keep using your ISP for Internet access.)

See our article "Web, email and domain name hosting providers" for more information on getting a web/email hosting provider for you.

4) Install your own mail server.

Larger organizations, or those with a technically sophisticated staff, may wish to consider the option of installing an in-house mail server. We generally don't think this is an appropriate choice for most grassroots activist groups, as the financial and administrative costs of setting up and maintaining your own mail server are significant.

Advantages

• Maximum control of email accounts
• Potential for advanced features such as shared email folders, centralized calendars, etc.

Disadvantages

• Complexity: maintaining a mail server is beyond the technical capacity of most groups.
• Cost of access. Mail servers work best with a permanent Internet connection. There are ways to use mail servers behind dialup connections, but it requires some technical sophistication from both the group and the Internet Service Provider.
• Difficult/impossible to access an in-house mail server from remote locations without a permanent Internet connection.