One communication service that you're almost guaranteed to use today is email. We use email for a wide range of communication. In an enterprise setting, it's important for a sysadmin, or a sole IT support specialist, to be able to configure email services for the company. To do this, you need to have a domain name set up for your company that you can use as your email domain, like devan@example.com. When you send or receive email, you want to use this email address. There are two ways to set up email for a company. The first is to run your own managed server. Using this option, you set up the email service software on a server, then you create a DNS record for your mail server. There are different DNS records. Remember that the A record is used for hostnames, but for email servers we use MX, for the mail exchange record. Email server setup can be one of the most complicated service to setup for a sysadmin. You have to get the email to actually work, protect your email addresses from spam, filter out viruses and more. If you'd like to learn more about setting up an email server, check out the next reading. An alternative approach to setting up your own email service is to use an email service provider, like Google Suite. These service providers allow you to create email inboxes and more by paying a monthly fee for every user in your organization. This ties you into the Gmail webmail client, and allows you to access your email from anywhere, as long as you're connected to the Internet. Whatever option you choose, you'll have to understand the differences between email protocols when you setup your email accounts. There are lots of email protocols out there, but we'll only do a rundown of the more common ones you'll hear about, POP3, IMAP, and SMTP. Post Office Protocol, or POP version 3, is an email protocol that downloads email from an email server onto your local device. It then deletes the email from the email server. If you want to retrieve your email through POP3, you can only view it from one device. There are a few reasons why you might want to use POP3 to get your email. If you need to keep your email storage under a certain quota, POP3 is a good way to maintain that storage limitation. Another benefit of POP3 is privacy. Your email can only be seen from your local device. If storage limitations and security are a concern for you, you might want to consider using POP3 over something like IMAP. Speaking of IMAP, or internet message access protocol, allows you to download emails from your email server onto multiple devices. It keeps your messages on the email server. This email protocol is one of the more popular ways to retrieve email. Last up is simple mail transfer protocol, or SMTP, which is a protocol used for sending emails. While POP3 and IMAP and other protocols can be used to retrieve email, there's only really one email protocol for sending email, SMTP. So there are lots of different email protocols that can be implemented, depending on the email software of you choose. You can read more about them in the supplemental reading. Email service is critical for any organization. Companies needs to be able to contact clients and business partners and communicate internally. If you work in an IT support specialist role, where you're handling system administration tasks, you will need to weigh the pros and cons of a dedicated email server or a cloud email service, decisions, decisions, decisions.
