When you work from your website as a home base to talk to your customers on a regular basis, you need a reliable form of communication. In the old days, a handshake and a smile were the best ways to greet customers, both new and returning. But today, as you acquire customers on the web, you need to have a way to make them feel welcome and attended to while they are shopping with you online. The most effective way is of course email.

When you sign up for hosting, whether you use a free service or go the more sophisticated route of managed hosting, you may get the chance to register one or more email accounts that you can use for your business. The number of email accounts you can get depends on the type of hosting account you pay for and the perks that come with it.

This is a fine option for someone who just needs one email account to go with a very basic internet site. So if you mainly use your website to present your qualifications or company overview, rather than a method of active sales or service, then you might only need one email account. You can direct comments or questions to one address and use this address on your business cards. For smaller Denver businesses, this is the perfect option.

But for larger businesses in Denver, email services are a must. Even if your hosting company offers you several accounts, you will probably want to look into another form of communication. This is due to the fact that these accounts are sometimes not as stable as the accounts you get with larger dedicated email services. The last thing you want is for your newsletter to get stuck and not be delivered because your hosting company is changing around the way they manage their email accounts.

So if you want to keep in touch with your clients or customers on a regular basis, if you want to welcome your new visitors who opt-in to your email list with a nice welcome letter, or if you simply want to set up an inter-office email network, look into Denver email services that are right for you. There are several options on the web.

Email services, Denver based and elsewhere, are basically companies that offer you email accounts that can either be independent or linked. Companies like Google's popular Gmail, allow users to chat with one another as well send email messages. You get free online storage as well as a great search feature that allows you to look up messages and find them instantly. On the down side, it only offers POP access and makes you look at a few ads along the way.

There are other email services that are popular on the web. These include Yahoo!, which has a decent spam filter included, FastMail, which offers IMAP access and few ads, and AIM Mail from AOL, which offers 2 GB of storage and great spam guards. Newer email services are offering more perks. Goowy Mail is a wonderful desktop program that also gives you an RSS feeder, games, and a calendar.

So before you settle on an email service for you business, look around and see what's available to you. Don't just settle for what you get with your hosting account when you could have so much more.