Net Business Goals Hosting services - e'Mail management

Summary - please note the whole page is ©Net Business Goals

If you have already used e'Mail elsewhere you will know that if you do not have a plan for managing them they will cause you a serious amount of pain, time and effort.

There are many guides available for avoiding SPAM and managing notes into folders so that is not repeated here. This guide is about how to use our specific facilities to the best effect.

If you want to skip directly to any of the following then you can click on the item in the list:

• Use secure Form-to-Mail and Contact details manager to avoid placing your contact details on your Web Site
  • eMail addresses that are in plain text can be harvested by robots looking in ordinary pages for text such as mailto:abuse@localhost or in simple Web Forms for hidden fields such as <input type=hidden name=recipient value='mailto:abuse@localhost'>.
  
  We provide this service for any Web Site (Hosted by us or not!) at a small additional charge to your hosting fees.
• Managing e'Mail on a PC (eg. MS Outlook):
  • Set deletion for a number of days after download plus always on delete
• Managing e'Mail using Squirrel Mail
  • Use a secure link - can be bookmarked by right-clicking on this link
  • Empty your Trash can at least once per week
  • Use an e'Mail client as well as Squirrel Mail so that important e'Mails that you do not discard are stored on your PC and backed up from there.
• Set up more than one e'Mail account
  • Don't use your Site admin account for regular e'Mails as important mail may get lost.
  • Creating a second account allows you to retain contact with "Web contacts" even if your first account has problems. Note that you MUST place restrictions on space used by each e'Mail user to avoid all your accounts becoming unusable.

1. Go to the "Mail" tab as described in (1) above, select the relevant account with a single click and then click on Properties which you will find on the Big buttons down the Right Hand Side.
2. In Properties - choose the "Advanced" Tab and then SE-lect the "Leave a copy on server" - ie it should be a small square box.¹ with a black "tick" in it. You must also set the period to keep the e'Mails - 28 days should be ample. If you choose the option "delete files at server when deleted from Trash Bin" then be aware that those delete actions you perform in this identity will cause the original e'mail account never to see those e'Mails.
3. Then click on the "Servers" Tab and change the Incoming Mail Server to the set of numbers including the dots that you made a note of from the results of the "ping" process.
4. Click on the relevant "OK" buttons until you are back at the Outlook main screen(s) ready to read mail.
5. Click on "Send/Recv" to download your e'Mails from your `ªoldes but note that it will leave them on the server because of ¹ above.

   Bear in mind that you will be intentionally creating duplicate e'mail messages when you retrieve them first on this account because you will have left them on the server for the original account to handle as "normal".

6. Once you have proved to yourself that this copy of your old e'Mail client account is downloading e'mail successfully² you do not need to use it again until immediately after the domain name has been "switched".

WebMail usage and quick way to see if the transitional period is over

Your welcome page will contain a link to the WebMail package that allows you to see your e'Mails from a browser client - eg Internet Explorer at work rather than Outlook Express at home - both accessing the same InBox.

Because you can access this without having to be physically at your own PC with it powered up and connected to the Internet you may find this is a useful way of checking if your new e'Mail account(s) are receiving mail. As soon as you are aware this is happening then you should use the e'Mail client copy account in your "New identity" (as in ² above) to download any e'mails that have been mis-directed or not downloaded in the transitional period.

Glossary of terms

To keep the text as brief and readable as possible we have used the terms:

• The domain to be moved to our service is the one (which you just agreed to purchase) which is currently running on another companies hosting service. This is normally the piece AFTER the 'www'. To be more precise in Internet terms it is a TLD or Top Level Domain, beneath which a company could have one or many sub-domains.
• For a short duration of time the "pointer" to the domain to be moved will be in a state of flux as thousands of DNSs (Directory Name Servers) across the globe propagate millions of changes per week. However, the transitional period we define is much longer in that from the initiation of the request to change such a pointer to it happening could be anything between seconds and weeks because depending upon who owns the domain name - the process could involve people and not all of them are necessarily seeing your request as their current top priority.
• During the transitional period loss of e'Mails will occur if the sender addresses mail to you at your old hosting service and you do not download it before the pointer to the domain to be moved switches to the new server. Also, loss of e'Mails could occur if the user name at domain to be moved is not valid and it is not picked up by the "Catch-all" facility - this is true in particular for the user name "mail" unless you set up a specific re-direction for that user name.
• An Incoming Mail Server is the server from which you download your e'Mails, it always needs a user name and password but to find it amongst the 2 billion Internet addresses you need to know either the exact number OR access it by a name, usually containing the domain to be moved. As the name switches pointer from the old hosting service during the transitional period to the new "the old" is almost impossible to find after the switch. This is the root cause of the problem that we are addressing in this page.
• An e'Mail client is normally a Windows-based PC but many others are available and supported by our servers but those instructions on this page which refer to e'Mail client will not be relevant.
• The relevant accounts are those e'mail accounts which have a Incoming Mail Server which has a name containing the domain to be moved.