Email Client Options with Northwest's Email Service

When you sign up for Northwest’s email service, you get security, storage, and top-notch customer service. If you want, you can also use all those features on an interface that feels a bit more familiar to you. Connecting your Northwest email service to your preferred email platform gives you a custom email address that matches your domain name, with less hassle and without compromising your privacy.

And if you don’t have your own preferred email platform, no problem! We can hook you up with reliable, open-source webmail. Read on to learn more about your options.

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Make Your Email as Flexible as Your Business

When you’re running a business, you don’t have a lot of extra time to spend setting up your email. And yet you need the professional shine of a business email address. Ideally, you need an adaptable email address that fits into your regular life without requiring you to make a lot of adjustments.

That’s where we come in. Our email hosting service gives you all the email functionality you need, along with the ability to sync up with the email client, or interface, of your choice, like Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail. Even if you choose a third-party email client, you’re still getting email hosted by us at Northwest. Think of it as the best of both worlds.

What’s the different between an email hosting service and an email client?

At Northwest, we offer our own email hosting service, which means we built the email servers that store and manage your email data. Email clients (also known as email interfaces) are the apps and tools you use to manage those messages.

It may help to think of email hosting as the restaurant where your food is made and stored. But when you decide to connect Northwest to an email client like Gmail, Apple Mail, or Outlook, you’re choosing what kind of plate you want to eat the food on. Northwest is still in charge of the kitchen and food safety, but you get some say in the presentation of each course.

What are the benefits of Northwest’s hosting service?

We store the emails you send and receive on our servers, not on a third party’s servers. We’re in charge of things like spam filtering as well.

All this means we can provide server space to help you scale your email service as quickly as you need to keep up with your growing business. So if your business is expanding and you want to go from having five inboxes to 10 inboxes, we can make that adjustment on our own servers. We’re not asking Google or Apple to make the adjustment for us, which gives you more control over your business.

So am I using a Northwest product for my email or what?

Yes, you are using a Northwest product when you use Northwest’s email service. Connecting Northwest email to the Outlook email client doesn’t mean you’re using Outlook’s servers. You’re simply using the Outlook email application.

To put it another way, the email application you use to view emails is on the front end, which is the part that you, the user, see. The email servers are on the back end, and that’s the part that we build and control in-house.

Learn more about types of email hosting.

Email Interfaces and Security

Using an email interface with our email hosting service is more secure than using, say, a free Gmail account. That’s because most free email accounts come with known email security issues for businesses.

But luckily, you’re not signing into a Gmail or Outlook or Yahoo account when you use our email service. You’re signing into Northwest, and we believe in Privacy by Default®.

What email interfaces can you connect to with Northwest?

The most common email clients people connect tothrough Northwest are Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail. You’ll receive instructions on how to connect to those three email clients after you sign up for an email account. Or, if you want to get ahead of the game, you can go ahead and check out our basic connection guide.

If you want to connect to another email client outside the three mentioned above, just ask us! We’ll tell you if it’s possible. Those three email clients are the starting point, not an exhaustive list.

Do I have to connect to another email client?

You do not have to connect to another email client if you don’t want to. It’s an option designed to make you more comfortable with how you get your email, but it’s by no means mandatory.

If you don’t connect to an outside client, you’ll be using RoundCube, an open source, web-based email interface. It’s easy to use and we’ll offer you help to get started. And if you run into any trouble, you can always contact our customer support team. We’re staffed by humans, not bots, and we want to help you, not confuse you or spend the whole conversation trying to upsell you on other products that you don’t want. Above all else, we’re here to help!