Our clients can access their email online at http://mail.yourdomain.com. (always replace the "yourdomain.com" with your actual website domain address).

When to use web-based email

This web-based email system is useful if you are traveling or need to access your email from a remote location. When accessing your email from a standard location, like your home or office, it is best to use an email processing system, like Microsoft Outlook. Outlook Express is also a good program and is available for free download.

It is better to use an email processing system instead of the web based email system on a regular basis because the web based email system is subject to the quirks of any website, such as page refreshes. If you are composing a long email and your page refreshes or your connection is lost, you can lose the email that you have typed. It can be frustrating, but can be resolved by composing and sending your emails through an email client such as Outlook. 

Different types of email accounts that you can set up

There are two main types of email accounts within your system: USERS and ALIASES.

USERS are actual mailboxes that are assigned to individual users within the system. An example of these would be joe@yourdomain.com or tom@yourdomain.com. Each person would have their own log-in name and password, and they can get and send mail and store mail in their boxes.

After you have created new USER accounts, these users can log in at http://mail.yourdomain.com. They log in with their full account name (user@yourdomain.com), and their given password.

ALIASES are somewhat “fake” email accounts, and do not actually have their own space or “mailbox” on the server. Examples of commonly used aliases would be info@yourdomain.com or customerservice@yourdomain.com. These are typically created to route email (and to make it seem as though you have a big staff handling all of your clients concerns and needs). Each ALIAS, instead of collecting mail into its own box, simply re-routes the mail to a specified USER account.

Perhaps all of the customer service related ALIASES would forward to suzy@yourdomain.com, and everything that has to do with quote requests could forward to janie@yourdomain.com. One possible benefit for ALIASES is that Janie does not have to check several different email boxes for her mail, all of her mail and the quote request mail all will automatically go into her main mail box.

Setting up email accounts for individual users in your company

To set up email accounts for the people in your business, you will need to log in to your main/administrative email account online. You can log in at http://mail.yourdomain.com with the username of admin@yourdomain.com and with the password previously given to you (your main account password). Here you can create other accounts and modify account settings.

When you log in, you will see a drop down menu on the right that says “Administrative Account Options”.

HOW TO: Add a New User Account

Drop that down to User Administration to add and modify USERS. You will see a list of current user accounts for your domain. Click ADD to add a new user.

You will assign a user ID which will be the first part of the email address. Example: jsmith as a username will result in an email address of jsmith@yourdomain.com. User Identification (UserID) may be from 3 to 30 characters long and must consist of alphanumeric, '_','-' and periods.

Then you enter the first and last name of the person who will use that account. Next you enter and confirm a password. Passwords may be from 3 to 30 characters long and cannot contain spaces.

You can set maximum amounts of total email size (in MB) that is allowed to be stored in their account at any time, as well as maximum amount of messages they can have in the box before it is declared “full”. Set both of these to “0” to keep them unlimited. You can also modify account settings such as if the account user can modify their password or not.

HOW TO: Add a New Alias

Drop the dropdown box down to Alias Administration to add and modify ALIASES. You will see a list of all current aliases. Click ADD to add a new alias. 

To create a new alias, you will only need the alias ID – which again will be the first part of the email address, such as “info” would be the alias ID for info@yourdomain.com. Alias names are limited to 45 characters and must be created from the character set of A-Z, a-z, 0-9, '_' and '-'. The name cannot contain spaces and must be unique within the system. Leave the setting as Standard, and in the Destination box, type in the email address that you would like the emails from this alias to forward to. It can forward to another USER in your email system (joe@yourdomain.com) or to a completely different email address altogether (joesmith@gmail.com).

HOW TO: Create a "catch-all" account

Two good aliases that you should create are “nobody” and “postmaster,” even if you aren’t going to create any other aliases. What these do is create a “catch all” alias, so for example, if your email address is mikey@yourdomain.com and someone misspells it mikee@yourdomain.com, this email will be caught by these “catch all default aliases”. It will then send the incorrectly addressed email to whomever you point these aliases to. Any email that is sent to ANYTHING@yourdomain.com will be caught by the nobody or postmaster aliases.

HOW TO: Set Up your Preferences

Other options you can do while setting up your account include setting your preferences. These include choices as to how many messages you want to display on your screen at once, how you want your messages to sort by default, etc.

'These preferences apply only to your web based email - if you check your email through Outlook or another program, you will need to set up those preferences within that software as well.

Look through the options here and let us know if you have any questions. It is mostly self-explanatory.

Some Additional Features in the Drop Down Menu

You can also change your signature, which is a small set of text that appears at the bottom of every email you send (perhaps including your contact information).

And also your mail forwarding information, where you would simply enter an email address that you would like ALL mail sent to that account forwarded to. (For example if you want all of your joe@yourdomain.com to forward to a yahoo address, type that yahoo address into the box on the change mail forwarding page.)

You may set up an autoresponder for when you are on vacation or away from your computer for an extenbded time. Simply select "Autoresponder" in the drop down menu, select "inbox" from the drop down menu on the next screen, enter in your email subject (example "Out Of Office" and message (example: "I will be out of the office until Tuesday and will read and reply to emails at that time. Please contact Sally at 555-1212 if this is an emergency.") and click SAVE. There are some additional options available which you can learn about on this page.