Mail Overview
E-mail is one of the primary services your web site will use. This document is going to explain how e-mail works, what you need to know before you implement your own e-mail, and what the settings within your control panel actually mean.
How E-mail Works
Internet mail servers use the smtp protocol to pass mail back and forth. This just means that the machine that's got mail to deliver contacts the receiving machine, tells it who the mail is coming from and going do, and delivers the body of the message. That's it, and it's all conducted in plain text. In fact, you can log in manually using a telnet client and send e-mail directly through your smtp server, but that's really just done by geeks when they need to diagnose a problem.
Once the e-mail has been received, it's dumped unceremoniously in a directory and the smtp server is done with it. In order to receive your e-mail, you need to have your mail client talk to a pop3 or imap server. These both do the job of delivering mail to recipients, but there are a couple of differences:
- Pop3 (short for "post office protocol, version 3") does what most people expect: you log in, get a list of your messages, download them, then delete them to clean things up. Mail is now stored on your local computer.
- Imap (" Internet Message Access Protocol ") works a bit differently. Instead of downloading messages to your local mail client, messages are saved on the server. This means if you use imap you can access your same list of messages (including sent messages if you set things up right) from home, the office, and webmail. It also means that the size of your mailbox affects your quota on the server, and you'll not be able to access e-mail if your local internet connection goes down.
An important point to note here is that e-mail is not secure. E-mail is the wrong place to discuss your medical history, financial details (especially credit card account numbers!), corporate strategies, or anything else sensitive. We've got an article on securing e-mail you might want to read if you need greater security than regular Internet e-mail.
Things to Keep In Mind
You've got a number of options when setting up e-mail. This is a great thing, but it can be intimidating when you first confront it.
- When an e-mail is sent to user@yourdomain, there are a couple of things that can happen to it: it can get stored in a mailbox so a local user can access it later; or it can be passed off to another e-mail address entirely (this is called mail forwarding, where user@domain gets forwarded to anotheruser@anotherdomain, or an e-mail to officestaff@yourdomain gets to Betty, Bob, Brenda, Barbara, and Billy). When creating mail accounts, you'll probably want most accounts to be normal mailbox accounts, but accounts like "webmaster," "info," "quote-request," and the like can safely be forwarded to the employee that will handle them.
- We provide filtering for e-mail which keeps almost all viruses out of your system and takes a big chunk out of the spam you receive. By default mail marked as spam will have "*****SPAM*****" added to the subject line for easy filtering, and messages found to contain viruses are deleted. You can control both of these settings, along with the sensitivity of the spam filter (see the tuturial below).
- Part of our filtering involves checks against the server sending mail to make sure it's not coming from a known spammer. It's unlikely, though possible, and someone you expect e-mail from will get caught in this system. Let us know if this happens and we'll work to make sure you're getting all the mail you're supposed to.
- Webmail is available for all users, whether they're using POP or IMAP to access mail. You can go to mail.yourdomain.com and click on one of the options to open the webmail program of your choice.
- POP3 is generally preferred over IMAP mail, because it's always available offline.
How to Use The Control Panel To Configure E-mail
Click here to view our visual tutorial.
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