When email needs attention
Email is the one system every person in the office uses all day, and it's usually the one set up with the least thought. Somebody opened an account years ago with whoever hosted the website, added mailboxes as people were hired, and it has limped along since.
These are the situations that bring people to us.
- Staff use personal free accounts for company business, so customer conversations walk out the door when an employee does.
- Your mail still lives with the web host or the internet company, the mailbox keeps filling up, and the phone and the computer never show the same thing.
- Three people share one login for the "info" address, and nobody knows who answered what.
- Invoices and estimates you send land in customers' junk folders.
- Someone got locked out, the recovery phone number belongs to a person who left, and nobody remembers who the administrator is.
- A customer calls to say they got a strange email from you that you never sent.
- You're paying for licenses for people who haven't worked there in a long time.
Setting up Microsoft 365 the right way
Buying the licenses takes ten minutes. The setup behind them is where the care goes, and it's the part that decides whether mail gets delivered and whether an outsider can get in.
We connect your domain name so addresses read as your business. Then we publish the records that tell other mail systems your messages are real. There are three of them (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), and missing or wrong ones are the most common reason a legitimate estimate ends up in someone's spam. We create each person's account, give them the license that matches what they do, and set up mail on their computer and phone.
We also set up the administrator account properly. It's a separate account that nobody uses for daily mail, it has its own strong sign-in, and its recovery details belong to the business owner. You'd be surprised how many offices we meet where the only admin was a nephew, a former office manager or a web designer who has since moved on.
Google Workspace too
Plenty of offices run on Google Workspace, and we support it the same way: setup, migration in or out, shared inboxes, security settings and account recovery. We don't push one over the other. If your team already works in one and likes it, the sensible move is usually to fix the setup, not switch platforms.
Moving mail from an old provider
A migration goes wrong in two ways. Mail goes missing, or the office comes in one morning and nobody can work. Both come from rushing. We do it in three stages.
Stage one: inventory
Before anything moves, we write down everything that touches email. That list is always longer than the owner expects.
- Every mailbox, how big it is, and who really uses it.
- Aliases and forwarding rules, including the forgotten ones sending copies to an outside address.
- Shared addresses like info, billing and scheduling.
- Calendars and contacts, and where they're stored now.
- Everything that sends mail by itself: the copier's scan-to-email, the accounting program, the website contact form, the appointment reminder system.
- Where the domain name is registered and who has that login.
That last one stops more projects than anything technical. If nobody can sign in to the domain account, we help you recover it first.
Stage two: pilot
We move one or two mailboxes first, usually someone patient and someone who uses every feature. Their old mail, folders, calendar and contacts get copied over while the rest of the office keeps working on the old system. We check that what arrived matches what left, set up their devices, and let them work that way for a bit. Whatever surprises turn up, they turn up for two people and not twenty.
Stage three: staged move
Old mail for everyone else gets copied in the background ahead of time. That's the slow part, and nobody notices it. When the copies are in place we pick a quiet time with you, switch the domain so new mail flows to the new system, run a final pass to catch anything that arrived during the switch, and then sit with each person to get their computer and phone signed in.
The old provider stays active for a while afterward as a safety net. We don't cancel it for you. We tell you when we think it's safe, and you decide.
Sign-in security and lockouts
Most break-ins we see at small offices don't involve anything clever. Someone typed their email password into a fake sign-in page, and the thief has been reading the mailbox ever since, waiting for an invoice to tamper with. The defense is multi-factor authentication, where signing in takes the password plus an approval on your phone.
We turn it on for every account, use an authenticator app in place of text messages where we can, and shut off the older sign-in methods that skip the second step. Each person gets a backup method on file, so a new phone doesn't mean a lost account. A password manager fits in here, and our cybersecurity and backup page explains how we set those up, along with why mail stored in the cloud still deserves its own backup.
When someone is locked out, we work through it in order: confirm with the owner that the person is who they say, reset access from the admin account, check the mailbox for forwarding rules a stranger may have added, and sign out every other session. Lockouts and most account work can be done over remote support, so nobody has to drive anywhere. If the lockout came after a scam phone call or a pop-up warning, the computer needs checking too, and that's covered under virus and scam removal.
When something simpler is enough
If you work alone and a free personal mailbox does the job, we won't tell you it's broken. The one change worth making is an address on your own domain, so the address is yours to keep no matter which provider sits behind it. A single paid mailbox does that. You can set it up yourself in an afternoon if you're comfortable following the provider's instructions for your domain.
Small moves don't always need us either. One person with a light mailbox can export the old mail to a file and import it on the new side. And if your current email works and your only worry is security, turning on multi-factor authentication where you already are is a better use of money than switching platforms.
The jobs where help pays off are the ones with several people, years of mail somebody can't afford to lose, shared addresses, or other systems that send mail for you. Medical and other regulated offices have extra settings and agreements to think through, and we can help you prepare for that as part of small business IT support. If you'd like accounts added, removed and watched as staff come and go, that's ongoing work under managed IT. And if the office phones are next on your list, read our page on business phones and VoIP.