Email Help and Rules

Email Setup

There are two ways to access your email.
1. Through a traditional email client (program) such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, Pegasus, Apple Mail or the new Windows Vista Mail.
2. Via the internet through your own website.

You can do one or both methods. Most people will setup their email access on a traditional email client, but may occasionally need to access their email via the web when they are away from their normal computer (on vacation, evacuating from hurricanes, etc).

IMPORTANT: If you have just received your email settings, your password is set to a default password included in the email you were sent. You should change this at your first opportunity. The only way you can change your password is through the WebMail option below. If you lose your password or forget it, we can not give it back to you, but we can reset it so you can login again. You will NOT lose email if you forget your password – it will just accrue in your box until your box becomes full.

Webmail Access

To access your webmail account, go to: http://www.yourdomain.com/webmail replacing “yourdomain.com” with, of course, the actual name of your website domain.

Enter your username: Your username is your entire email address. We will say this again – your username is your ENTIRE email address. That comprises everything before and after the sign. Thus, if your email address was salesbrevardwebhosting.com, your username would also be “sales@brevardwebhosting.com”, not “sales” and not “sales@brevardwebhosting”.

If you check the save for future button, this part will already be typed in for you on that machine from now on. Obviously, don’t check this option when accessing email from public terminals, work, etc.

Enter your password: This is the password that you chose, or were given. You will have an opportunity to change it in just a moment.

Once you have logged in, you will see three different user interface options to view and send email on the web: Horde, Squirrel Mail, and Round Cube. These are just different popular webmail interfaces that have been around on the web a long time. You can use any of the three or alternate between them. Use whichever seems simple or easy for you. We recommend the Round Cube option if you need a place to start.

Once in your mail, you’ll be able to send, receive, forward, and delete mail just as you can with any traditional webmail-based client. There is built in help if you really get stuck.

Before you pick one of the interface options, look below them and you’ll see some menu options: Change Password, Forwarding Options, Autoresponder Options, Aging, and Logout.

Change Password: Somewhat self-explanatory. Go here to make any changes to your password. We do not know your new password, and as a result, we can not read your email (nor do we want to anyway). All we can see is how full or empty your email boxes are. We recommend you pick a good secure password. If you need help picking a good password, visit the free password generator at http://www.goodpassword.com/.

Forwarding Options: If you want to set your email to send a copy of every email it receives to another email address, use this option. NOTE: This is to send a copy ONLY. If you set this option, but then never check your email box again here, your email box here will eventually fill up and people who send you email will start getting emails bounced back to them. Not good. Be sure you use this only for sending a copy and still check your box (either via Webmail or an Email Client) occasionally. If you need emails to forwarded, but NOT copied, contact us.

Autoresponder Options: An auto-responder is an email that is automatically sent back to the sender when they send you an email at that address. It is common to setup autoresponders for some email address like info@ or support@ so that the sender knows for sure that their email went through and when to expect an answer. For instance, you might say “Thank you for your email. We are working hard to serve our customers and will reply to your email within the next 24 hours, excluding Sundays and federal holidays. If you need more immediate assistance, please try us by phone at 999-555-1234.”

Aging: This allows you to setup a certain number of days for your emails to be deleted after logging out. We generally recommend you leave this setting alone unless you know what you are doing.

Traditional Email Client

These are the settings you will need for a traditional email client. These are also the same settings you can use to have email downloaded to your mobile phone or PDA (Your wireless provider may charge you for this, so be sure to check with them).

You will need to add an account to your email client first. If you don’t know how to do this, check the help instructions for your email program or device for “add email address” or “add account”.

Mailbox type: POP3
Mail Server Username: See “Enter Username” above
Incoming Mail Server: mail.yourdomain.com
Outgoing Mail Server: mail.yourdomain.com (server requires authentication)

If you have a checkbox for “Log on using Secure Password Authorization” (typically in Outlook or Outlook Express) do NOT check it.

If you have a checkbox for “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”, please DO check it and use the same settings as your incoming mail server.

Outlook Screenshots

If you use Outlook 98, 2000, 2003, or 2007 follow these screenshots to help. These screenshots are from Outlook 2003, but the others will look similar.

This assumes you have a fictional company called “Great Company”, whose website address is www.greatcompany.com. In this example, we are setting up an email address for info@greatcompany.com with a password of “password”. Of course, you’ll substitute greatcompany.com for your actual website domain name.

First click on Tools, and then choose “Email Accounts”. You should see the following introduction to the Wizard.

Choose “Add a new email account” and click Next.

Make sure that POP3 is selected and click Next.

Take your time here. You can type anything in “Your Name”. Here we have chosen the name of our company because that is what others will see when receiving our emails. In “Email Address”, we type the email address we are setting up. Both the POP3 and SMTP boxes under Server Information should be identical with “mail.greatcompany.com”. Under “User Name”, put the full email address that you are setting up. Just putting “info” would not work. Make sure that “Log on using Secure Password Authentication (SPA)” is NOT checked. Then type your password, paying attention to case, and click “More Settings” (not Next).

This is how the setting screen will look when you first get to it. Before we move on, let’s change that Mail Account name to something we might better recognize later and add an Organization Name, too.

That’s better. Now, if we ever need to change these settings again, we’ll be able to tell from the Mail Account name which email account these settings reference. And we’ve also added the name of our company again under Organization. This is especially helpful to recipients if you are setting up a personal email address, like john@greatcompany.com or julie@greatcompany.com.

Before we click OK, let’s click on the Outgoing Server tab and make sure the first box is checked. Once you do that, it should automatically default to the first bubble which reads “Use same settings as my incoming mail server”. Perfect. We are done. Click OK and then Next on the original wizard we started with.

Click Finish and send yourself a few test emails. Send them from one account to a different account and make sure you can send and receive to both.

Rules and Limits

There is a limit of 500 emails per hour. If you send over this amount in any hour most of the e-mails will bounce back with a undeliverable error. Keep in mind that a single email with 20 cc’s or bcc’s on it counts as actually 21 emails (1 for the To: recipient, and 20 for the copied recipients).

If you need to send out emails to large groups of people (hundreds or thousands), ask us about our “Email List” or “Newsletter” feature for your website.

Additionally, our servers have a 60 POP checks per hour limit. If you go over this you’re likely to get a wrong password error message saying login incorrect. Just wait an hour and it will automatically unlock you.

This means you shouldn’t be checking or sending email more than 60 times per hour (once per minute). This is per domain name, not per email account. So, assuming there are others in your organization sending and receiving emails, you should set your email program to check your email every 10 to 15 minutes.

To clarify, some email programs will check your email account every minute. Thus, if you are the only one checking email on your domain, that is fine (although such high-frequency checking will slow your internet connection from whatever else you are doing online). If you have other people with other email addresses on your account, and they are also checking every minute, you are going to have a problem. There is no need for it though. To prevent this from happening again make sure to disable Auto-Checking or at least set it to something higher – such as checking for new emails every 10 minutes.

Mailing Lists Rules

The following applies only to Email Lists and Newsletters. If you are sending out your own little newsletter to 12 of your friends, that is NOT a Newsletter as it pertains to this section. This is for those of you who are running subscription-based email lists or newsletters off your website and have hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of subscribers.

1. All email lists and newsletters are automatically throttled. This means that emails are sent out every ten seconds with no more than 100/hour. So, if your email list is 500 strong, it will take 5 hours for all the emails to be delivered. Email lists and Newsletters are for frequent communication with large groups. They are not intended to send out multiple messages daily – a bulletin board or discussion board is more appropriate for that frequency of communication.
2. Any mailing list over 900 emails is only allowed to be sent to during off-peak times to prevent high server loads. Off peak times qualify as all day Saturday and Sunday, and 1am – 8 am eastern time M-F.
3. You are not allowed to mail to a mailing list you were given or purchased. This is spamming because they never agreed to you personally sending them mail. We do not care how you justify it – This is spam and will result in termination of the offending account.
4. Any unsolicited e-mail being sent will result in termination of the offending account. We take a zero tolerance stance against sending of unsolicited e-mail.
5. We do not allow mailing lists to have more than 4,000 subscribers. You can contact us with your specific requirement to get a quote for lists larger than 4,000.
6. Any mailing list must comply with all spam guidelines set forth by the United States. These can be found at: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm
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