The standard dial-up account offered by most ISPs (Internet Service Providers) is often the starting point for many small businesses when email access becomes a requirement. A modem, telephone line, email application software and dial-up account are all that’s required to get online.

Standard dial-up accounts generally include one email address with a username of choice. The domain name part of the address (everything after the ‘@’ symbol) is common to all dial-in users of the particular provider for this type of account. For example, a Big Pond dial-in customer would have an address of username@bigpond.com

Of course, most businesses will want the company name or some derivative of it as part of the domain name. In addition, they also usually want multiple email accounts, including a general company account plus individual user accounts.

That’s where the ISP comes into the picture. An ISP can host a suitable domain name on a company’s behalf and can also offer multiple email accounts, each account existing as a separate mailbox on the ISPs’ server. Individual users can then access their email via separate modems but this quickly becomes unwieldy if there are more than three accounts involved.

For this reason, most businesses use some kind of sharing technique, so that users can access their respective mailboxes through a common Internet connection point on the local area network. Often, this connection is made via a single 56K modem, which is shared using proxy server software such as WinGate, WinProxy or SyGate, etc. Hardware-based proxy servers are also available. We looked at WinGate in detail last month and we’ll be looking at a couple of hardware solutions in a future article.

Fig.1: a minimum system requires the MDaemon Server and the MDaemon Documentation and Help components.

Fig.2: during setup, you have to enter the IP address of your DNS server. This address is provided by your ISP.