Can someone answer my questions about ISPs in easy-to-understand language?

The non-profit I'm volunteering for owns its domain name.

We rent space in a building that has wi-fi provided by the landlords.

The problem is that a volunteer (now long gone) established an email service with this crappy company that doesn't return emails or phone calls. We can only access our email about 15% of the time, the rest of the time it tells us it doesn't recognize our passwords. It also doesn't forward messages to the Director's Outlook. The email company is also supposed to be developing our website, which it hasn't done so far.

We do pay our own phone costs, but we can't sign up for Bell South email because apparently our building isn't able to be wired for it. I don't understand why they have to wire anything since we have wi-fi.

We need a dedicated address because we have a mailing list of over 500 people coordinating to rebuild the Gulf Coast, including governmental agencies. But with a list so extensive, we've learned that our emails are being sent into spam files, especially with the government emails, and we really, really need them to get our emails. So Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. accounts aren't an option.

So my questions are:

Can we use our domain address to set up email through another provider when we're contracted with this crappy company already?

How do we find a provider who can work with our existing wi-fi system?

can I attempt to clarify?

When you say email service, do you mean Internet Service Provider?

When you say the email service is supposed to be developing your web page, do you mean hosting it or actually developing it?

Generally, if you aquire a domain name you can migrate that domain to any number of hosting companies, and maintain an email address of, for example, employee1@yourdomain.com however, each hosting company usually has a package listing how many e-mail addresses they will provide. You can also set up your own web/e-mail server in house and maintain an internal distribution of e-mail to internal employees, but that takes work to set up and maintain.

The access method, in this case wifi, is sort of irrelevant if the landlord is providing the access. It means he/she is allowing you to use their ISP pipe through his/her wireless access point so if you were to try and get your own Internet Service Provider, you would indeed need new wiring into the building as it would be a separate access than what your landlord provides.

LOL!

I guess (based on your response) that instead of ISP I should be asking about hosting companies. My main goal is to get a reliable external email system in place for the technophobes I volunteer with to work with easily after my volunteer gig is up.

So perhaps the phone company doesn't want to work with us because they don't want to host our email without using their own wiring? This is what is confusing me the most, why a communications company would turn away business saying they can't work with us because we have wifi already.
:shrug:

can't wire your building because the landlord already has Internet Access through a competitor. Since the Landlord is providing access for you, you need to find a hosting company. The Telco provides access, a hosting company provides the space for a web page (or pages) and e-mail accounts.

...if you're looking for a good hosting company, I can heartily recommend this one:

http://order.1and1.com/xml/order;jsessionid=330C5A6115897E5C021DDC14C2C0A4E4.TC60a?k_id=7422947

Reasonable prices and great service. Of course you'll have to read through their offerings to make sure they have all the bells and whistles you might need.

1) Find yourself an ISP that does mail hosting. Tell them what you want to do. If you like their service options, get the name of the mail server that will receive mail directed to your domain.

2) Contact your domain registrar (such as register.com or networksolutions.com), and ask that they set up an "MX" record in your domain's "zone file." It would have the following format:

mail.yourdomain.com. MX 10

You may find it simpler to find one company that does all of this. My registrar, register.com, registered my domain and hosts the zone file.

You could even keep your current mail hosting, but make it a back-up by getting a second MX record with a bigger (lower) priority setting:

mail.yourdomain.com. MX 20

All mail would try to go to the first server, but if that became unavailable, the second would receive the delivery.

I used to do this sort of thing for a living, so I may be able to help you navigate the strange world of ISPs.

A strange world where I can't tell the difference between ISPs and hosting companies! :crazy:

A world where a volunteer left us not knowing who our domain registrar is! :crazy:

A world that speaks a weird language that resembles English but which makes little sense to those outside the community! :crazy:

I'm very confused by your email. I don't know how to find out who our domain registrar is. Any suggestions?

I'm not sure what the difference is between an ISP and a hosting company is; for instance, I (as a non-profit) don't want to pay for Internet service if it's already being provided for free from my landlord. I did ask the landlord who hosts the wifi, but it's CableOne, and I assume any email account I set up through them would be required to have a cableone.net tag on the end of every email address (i.e., me@cableone.net as opposed to me@mynonprofit.org). That's not what I want at all. So what is the difference between an ISP and a hosting company?

I think I'll just leave my questions about the strange and mysterious "MX" and "zone file" alone until I understand the answers to the questions posed above.

Thank you for taking the time to answer. I have an post-graduate degree, but this stuff makes me feel d-u-m-b!

... http://www.networksolutions.com and click on the WHOIS link near the bottom of the page. Enter your domain name (e.g. "yourdomain.com" without the quotes), and the page that will follow should have some useful information:

"Current registrar" is the registrar that was last used to buy and register the domain.

"Domain servers listed in order" are the servers that you allowed to answer "authoritatively" for queries on your domain. These servers should have current copies of the zone file which the world will use to translate names to IP addresses (the purpose of DNS).

"Record expires on" the date that your ownership of the domain runs out, if not renewed.

The administrative and technical contact information should look familiar to you, and "registrant" should be your organization. If the "registrant" is a private individual who is no longer associated with you, it may be that you and your group don't really own the domain name.

If you'd like to share your domain name here, or via PM, I might be able to tell you more.

There's more stuff I don't understand when I pull the registration up.