Business Email
For a professional touch, you will want to create an email account for your website. I am currently using Courier Email, which I like very much. It allows you to send HTML emails easily. Unfortunately Courier Email is no longer available from Rose City Software, but they do have an updated version called PocoMail at a very low cost. It does appear to be available for download from Brothersoft.
What settings do you use for your email?
Sending Mail - Many IPs (internet providers) require you use your personal settings for SMTP, or sending mail out. If this is not the case, then use the settings from your Web Host. If you would rather not use your personal ISP (Internet Service Provider) to send your emails, you can use the option of having another provider send them for you. I use smtp2go and have been very happy with the service and the price.
Receiving Mail - For incoming mail you would use the settings provided by your Web Host.
Signature - Create a signature for your business emails with your logo. You can do this in your HTML editor.
Mailing List - phplist makes it easy to keep up-to-date on your mailing list members. You can download phplist through Fantasico at Lunarpages*. When it comes time to update phplist, you can do so easily through your Lunarpages Fantastico Control Panel.
Remember Lunarpages only allows 400 emails to be sent per hour, so change your "config" file in phplist to make sure you don't go over the limit. If you do, your emails will not be sent. Find the "MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE" and "MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD" in the "config" file after opening it with Notepad and it adjust it to under 400 per hour to allow for automated emails.
Make sure if you update phplist, that you fix the config file again. I speak from experience on this. I unfortunately had my emails stopped because it will send them all at once. Web hosts frown on this.
Don't want to get a confirmation email for each email you send from phplist? It's easy to change that by going to your admin panel configure, then to "Who gets the reports". Delete the info in the box and put in just a 0 (zero). You will no longer receive a report of every email that was sent.
Content - Mail providers may consider your emails spam if you aren't careful on your email title. Avoid words such as free, etc. in your title. I also recommend using text emails, as many services do not display HTML.
*Lunarpages is used only as an example, because I am familiar with them.