Setting up your email package

Setting up your email package to send/receive emails on our servers

Set up this new email account in addition to any that are already defined. Don’t change or delete any existing email account in your email package. We don’t use Windows email packages because we use Apple computers (and therefore we know Apple Mail, Postbox and Thunderbird). We can’t advise on setting up your Windows mail system. However you should be able to find your way around well enough to do this.

Settings

Use the POP and SMTP protocols for receiving and sending. Only use IMAP and SMTP from a mobile device for checking emails when away from the home or office.

Set the email address and the “reply to” (if you see this field) to xxx@xxxx.com.
Set the name to your name.
POP (receiving) Server: mail.xxxx.com
SMTP (sending) Server: mail.xxxx.com *(note below)
Account/Username: xxxxxxx
Password: xxxxxxx
Note that we send you the values to use for the email address, POP, SMTP, account name and password.

We set the mailbox size to a default value. The size needed depends on how much email you get, how often you read it, and how large the emails are. We get alerts if you get close to this total and then increase it as necessary.

*You will also be sending emails via your domain name’s SMTP server. You therefore have to switch on SMTP authentication in your email package. This allows the server to know who you are and that you’re authorised to send emails through it. Usually this is a tick/check box. You need to use the same username/password as for POP (see above). The port for SMTP is 25 or 26. If your ISP blocks port 25, try 26 instead. You can also have secure SMTP (marked as TLS or SSL) but you must use port 465. You may have to bypass an ‘unable to verify server’ message, probably only once. Note that if you use secure mail, you may have to OK a ‘new certificate’ message once a year when we renew the secure mail certificates.

Don’t retain email on the server!

In most email packages, you can set things so that emails are immediately deleted from the mail server after you’ve read them. This is the best setting. If you choose to retain emails on the server for a number of days, please do not set the number of days too high. 7 days is usually enough, if you feel you need to set a retention period at all. Most people do not need to retain email on the server once its read to your computer.

An option (and its sometimes the default in a few mail packages) is to retain emails on the server forever or until you delete them from your computer. Please do not do this because your mailbox will fill up quickly, and we will not keep extending it.

If it doesn’t work or you get errors

If you get an error trying to send email, past experience tells us that these are the usual causes…

• You have not switched on SMTP authentication.
• You have enabled secure email (sometimes called TLS) and the mail server does not support this on port 25. If you want to use secure, switch to port 465.
• Your provider (ISP) is blocking SMTP mail to another server. Try changing the SMTP port (in the mail program setup) from 25 to 26 for this mail account.