Business Email

Which businesses need business email?

Business email is needed by companies whose sales, purchasing or customer service stop when email goes down, and that must keep their correspondence as a business record. A simple email hosting plan may be enough for a team of a few people; but if any of the following applies to you, business email is the better choice:

• The user count is growing: teams split into departments, with regular joiners and leavers.
• Mailboxes are large: sales, purchasing, accounting and project teams who work heavily with quotes, contracts, technical drawings and invoices as attachments.
• Correspondence must be kept: companies that need business mail to stay accessible for years and want to be ready for audits or legal proceedings.
• There is a field team: sales reps, service engineers and managers who spend most of the day on phones and tablets.
• Downtime is expensive: organisations that want a written service level and priority support for email availability.

If you want shared calendars and contacts, aliases and distribution lists and two-factor authentication on a single platform, also consider LIONFIN’s own platform, xMail.

What do the business email plans include?

LIONFIN business email plans come with large mailbox quotas, archiving, mobile sync, spam and virus filtering and migration support as standard; the higher plans add daily backup, an SLA and priority support.

The number of accounts and the quota per account vary by plan; current values are on the plan cards on this page. Standard IMAP and SMTP access means you work with Outlook, Apple Mail and mobile mail apps.

Why does email archiving matter?

Email archiving keeps a copy of incoming and outgoing mail that is independent of the user’s mailbox; even if an employee deletes a message or leaves the company, the correspondence is not lost. Backup and archiving are often confused, but they serve different purposes:

• A backup is a copy of the system at a given moment; its purpose is recovery after a failure or mistake, and it is usually kept for a limited time.
• An archive keeps correspondence searchable over a long period; its purpose is to let you find an old quote, approval or contract discussion.

Many jurisdictions, including Turkish commercial law, require business correspondence to be kept for a set period; we recommend agreeing the period and scope that apply to your company with your accountant or legal adviser. For mail containing personal data, retention periods and access rights should also be defined under the applicable data protection law. When you set an archive policy, put in writing who may access which mailbox, who approves search requests and how data is destroyed at the end of the retention period.

What does mobile sync give a field team?

Mobile sync means every action you take on a message on your phone (reading, moving, deleting, replying) is reflected immediately on your computer and in webmail; you do not have to manage the same message separately on three devices. For companies with field teams, in practice this means:

• A sales rep who sends a quote from their phone during a customer visit finds it in Outlook’s Sent Items folder back at the office.
• A manager who reads a message on a tablet and moves it to a folder sees it in the same folder on the computer while discussing it with a colleague.
• If a phone is lost, the mail is not, because it lives on the server; change the password and add the account to the new device.

For sync to work properly, accounts must be added as IMAP; POP3 downloads mail to one device and deletes it from the server, which breaks syncing with other devices. Screen lock and device encryption on company phones stop a lost device from opening a door to company mail.

What are the server and port settings for business email?

Business email accounts work with the standard email protocols: IMAP (993, SSL/TLS) for incoming mail and authenticated SMTP (465 SSL/TLS or 587 STARTTLS) for outgoing mail. The server names for your account are shown on the service screen of the customer panel.

When adding a new user, first create the account and its password in the panel, then set it up on their devices. If you want everyone to use the same signature template for a consistent look, define it centrally before rolling out. If your office firewall restricts outgoing connections, make sure the ports above are allowed.

Domain authentication: how do you set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC?

For mail sent from business email to reach recipients, your domain needs correctly configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC records; together they make it harder for others to send mail in your name and give receiving servers confidence. In a business environment the key point is to account for every system that sends mail on behalf of your domain:

1. Add the business email server to your SPF record.
2. List the services that send mail in your name, such as your CRM, accounting software, website forms or newsletter tool, and include them in the same SPF record. Do not create a second SPF record.
3. Add the DKIM public key shown in the panel as a TXT record.
4. Publish your DMARC record with p=none first and watch the incoming reports for a few weeks.
5. Once you can see that every legitimate source passes, raise the policy to quarantine and then reject.

This order prevents important automated mail, such as invoice notifications, from being blocked by mistake.

How do you switch from your current email provider?

A business email migration consists of creating the accounts, copying mailboxes over IMAP, changing the MX record and running a final sync. With migration support you plan this process together with our team. A typical migration plan:

1. Inventory: list the addresses, forwarders and shared mailboxes to move, along with mailbox sizes.
2. Account creation: create the same addresses at LIONFIN and share temporary passwords with users over a secure channel.
3. Initial copy: mail in the old mailboxes is copied to the new accounts with the folder structure preserved, while users keep working on the old system.
4. MX change: the MX record is updated outside working hours. Lowering the record’s TTL a few days beforehand speeds up propagation.
5. Final sync: mail that landed on the old server during propagation is moved across with a second copy run.
6. Device update: account settings on users’ phones and computers are changed to the new server details.

Contacts and calendars are not carried by email protocols; you need to export them from the source system.

What should you look for when choosing a business email plan?

The right business email plan covers your user count with room to grow, fits the quota of your busiest mailboxes and includes the service level you need. Weigh up these criteria together:

• User count and growth: add upcoming hires and department addresses to today’s headcount.
• Quota profile: not everyone’s mailbox grows at the same rate. Management, sales and accounting mailboxes are usually far larger than others; base your choice on the biggest ones.
• Backup needs: if being able to restore an accidentally deleted folder is critical, look at plans with daily backup.
• Service level: for organisations where an email outage means lost revenue, the higher plans with an SLA and priority support are a better fit.
• Migration scope: if you are moving from several old providers or very large mailboxes, discuss the scope with the support team before ordering.

You can compare which feature is in which plan on the plan cards on this page.

How do you keep business email secure?

Business email security comes from server-side filtering and in-house user policies working together; even the best spam filter cannot make up on its own for a weak password or a user who clicks a phishing email.

On the server side, incoming mail passes through spam and virus filtering, and known malicious attachments and suspicious senders are removed.

On the company side, we recommend putting these policies in writing:

• A unique, long password for every user, and use of a password manager.
• Changing a departing employee’s password the same day, and forwarding or archiving their mailbox.
• Verifying bank detail changes and urgent payment requests by phone through a second channel; this is the most common form of business email compromise (BEC).
• Using only encrypted connections in mail programs.
• Giving staff a short phishing awareness training session at least once a year.

How do you separate website and application mail from business email?

Business email accounts are designed for employees writing to each other and to customers; website forms, e-commerce order notifications and automated mail from ERP and CRM systems should leave through a separate sending channel. There are three reasons:

• Sending limits: the hourly and daily sending limits on user accounts are set for human correspondence; bulk notifications hit them.
• Reputation: lots of bouncing automated mail lowers the reputation of the company domain and the server, which can push employees’ mail into spam too.
• Security: typing an employee’s password into an application puts the company mailbox at risk if that application is compromised.

The healthiest approach is to use an authenticated SMTP relay for application mail. LIONFIN SmartHost covers this need with sending reports and per-account limits. IT teams considering their own mail server can read SMTP relay or your own SMTP server.

How do support and monitoring work for business email?

LIONFIN’s business email infrastructure is monitored 24/7 by NOC and SOC teams; if you run into a problem, open a ticket from the Support section of the customer panel. Our target for the infrastructure is 99.99% uptime; this is a target, and a written commitment is given only in the service agreement of plans that include an SLA.

To get a ticket resolved quickly, we recommend including:

• The affected email address and the device or program used (for example Outlook, iPhone Mail, webmail).
• The full text or a screenshot of the error message.
• For a bounced email, the whole bounce message; its technical headers show where the problem is.
• Roughly when the problem started, and whether it affects one user or the whole company.

On higher plans with priority support, your tickets go to the front of the queue. If you suspect an outage affecting several users, mark the ticket as urgent and state how many users are affected; this helps set the priority of the response. Learn more about the facility on our data center page.