This 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 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.

The reason why it is better to use an email processing system instead of the web based email on a regular basis is that the web based email system is subject to the quirks of any website, and 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 in Outlook or something similar. You can get instructions on setting up Outlook here.

The main account is the administrative account, and you can log in at http://mail.yourdomain.com as admin@yourdomain.com with the password previously given to you (your main account password). Here you can create other accounts and modify account settings.

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

USERS are actual boxes 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.

On the left is a button bar. Logoff will log you off of web mail. Compose will let you compose a message to be sent. Read Mail takes you to your new and old messages. Options brings you to your various administrative options at the bottom of the page. Top brings you back to the top of the page.

ALIASES are “fake” email accounts, and do not actually have their own space or “mailbox” on the server. Examples of these 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 nice, 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 the person who handles that item.

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 use for ALIASES is that Janie does not have to check three different email boxes for her mail, all of her mail and the quote request mail all will automatically go into her main mail box.

HOW TO:

When you log in as admin@yourdomain.com at http://mail.yourdomain.com, you will see a drop down menu on the right that says “Administrative Account Options”.

Drop that down to User Administration to add and modify USERS. 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.

Drop it down to Alias Administration to add and modify ALIASES.

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 but can override the userid. Leave the setting as Standard, and in the Destination box, type in the email USER 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 (pam@yahoo.com).

Creating 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 mickkey@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.

Other options you can do while setting up your account include setting your preferences. You can look through the options here and let me know if you have any questions. It is mostly self-explanatory.

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.)

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