ISP verses FQ Email

[Jon12345]

Currently, when I get enquiries from online HTML Forms on my various websites, they all get sent to an email address supplied by my ISP.

Is it best to keep things this way or should I use my hosts pop servers? Which would be more reliable? Which tends to have fewer problems?

Also, if I have 5 different sites on my hosting account, should I use a pop account for each site or just use one pop account? What do webmasters generally do?

Thanks,

Jon

[Dreamquick]

For business sites always use an email address at that site, it just looks more professional and so makes potential customers feel happier about using your site.

If that means you need several different POP3 boxes then that's fine, after all it costs next to nothing to get 50 mailboxes and it's not hard to reroute your email so you can also avoid having to check too many mailboxes too.

Using your ISP to host them depends on several things...

Will they do this sort of thing? Most of the ones I've been with won't consider it unless you are buying part of the email service for those domains through them.

Are their mail services reliable? Lots of ISPs seem to treat their mailboxes as a fringe benefit of internet access, which is fine for personal usage but is useless for business.

Are you armed with a backup plan incase your ISP dissappears overnight (or suddenly stops accepting your incoming mail)? Having a site up and running is no use if no customers can communicate with you.

- Tony