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Virtual e-mail is also known as e-mail aliasing.

So, what's a POP account?

To further illustrate, let's create a fictitious company called XYZ Ltd. which makes widgets.  This company is not a large company and currently the owners (Joe Smith and his wife Jane) are running the business from their garage at home.

Joe and Jane have a corporate account with Storm Internet, and Storm provides the web hosting for their domain www.xyz.com.   The account has a dial-up username of jsmith with an associated password.   This means that the POP account for ABC Ltd is jsmith@storm.ca

However, Joe and Jane do not want people to know that their organization is a home based business, and they would like to have more professional e-mail addresses.

Using the Storm Internet e-mail administration page, they decide that they want to create the following aliases:

Each e-mail alias is forwarded to the POP account joesmith@storm.ca.   Whenever an e-mail is sent to any one of the above aliases, Joe and Jane receive it on their POP account, and deal with each message as it comes in.

This may sound like a confusing method of e-mail, but it does have some advantages:

1. Small organizations can have an effective Internet presence in the same way that larger organizations do
2. Every time an e-mail is sent, the web site address is also being advertised
3. The size of the company is obscured, leaving more room for emphasis on the quality of the product or service
4. Since e-mail is being forwarded to 1 POP account, this provides a central location for all messages
   • Note - if there are multiple POP accounts, e-mail aliases can point to different POP addresses

As time goes on, Joe and Jane's business grows, with more employees needing e-mail addresses.  Joe and Jane decide to create new POP accounts, each with dial up access to the Internet.  New POP accounts, mean that aliases can be forwarded to them as in the following example:

In the table above, Mary and Bob both have their own personal e-mail address.  In addition, Mary also receives sales related e-mail, and Bob receives e-mail about the products.  Again, the e-mail aliasing concept allows for growth of the company as it matures.