POP E-mail
Most likely if you have an e-mail account through an Internet Service Provider it will be a POP e-mail account. When you sign up for hosting services you are given the ability to setup one or more POP accounts for use in association with your domain name. For example bill@yourname.com, and mary@yourname.com. Each POP account holds mail on the web server in a separate account for each user. Each user has the ability to login to the server using a username and password specific to a POP mailbox and retrieve his or her e-mail securely from anywhere in the world. Often a user will use an e-mail program such as Microsoft Outlook to access a POP e-mail account, others times one may prefer to use a web based e-mail program the hosting provider has setup to access individual accounts.

E-mail Forwarding
Allows you to specify an existing e-mail address where all e-mail will be sent to an address even though the e-mail sender may be addressing the mail to various receipients. For example if you wish to setup various e-mail aliases (sales@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, etc.) throughout your web site, you can have all e-mail sent to these addresses end up in your personal e-mail account. The advantage is a time savings from not having to login to various different e-mail accounts frequently to check on new mail. All mail is received in a single central mailbox.

A variation of this is to have several e-mail addresses forward to unique e-mail address, possibly to other domain mailboxes. This is a great tool for employees that may already have an e-mail address they prefer to use on a daily basis. Also when a user changes e-mail address this provides the capability to make sure they do not loose any mail from receipients who were not aware of the address change. Once again this type of e-mail forwarding can be a useful tool since the user will not have to check and maintain separate POP accounts for every each and every mailbox they have ever owned.

Autoresponders
Another e-mail service available is an autoresponder. With an autoresponder you can set up an e-mail alias at your domain to automatically send a pre-written message to anyone who sends mail to that address. Sending an "on vacation" notice is an example on how an autoresponder can be used. Permanently setting up an email address to respond with a specific message could also have a wide variety of business informative applications. Later you could also follow up with more information then included in the auto response message depending on the request.