This question popped up a few days ago. It is an interesting one. It is useful to think about different aspects of the system and which ones you can control and what could go wrong if you are not adequately protected.
The following is an easy to follow set of checks to make sure your mail is secure.
There are three main elements: Continue reading Is my mail secure?
We have had an issue in May with mailing messages out to large groups of people using the BCC field in emails. This is generally used as a way of preventing people from seeing who else is on a mailing list. Within the hosting there is a limit of 25 email addresses in the BCC field before it is detected as a possible spam source by the hosting company. If a mail is detected as suspect and flagged as such, a rate limit will apply for the next hour limiting the number of mails sent out to 25. If this happens to you, you will receive warning messages from the mail system. Do note here that an email sent to 5 people is counted as 5 emails.
The practice of using the bcc field in emails is also one regularly adopted by hackers and spammers to send out bulk mail. The hosting not only checks mail coming into the system, but also checks it going out. If it considers the mail to be suspect it is marked as such which may cause problems at the receiving end too, BT and AOL are particularly sensitive to mail coming in marked as a possible spam message. Continue reading Sending out messages to lists of people?
Over the past 4-5 years there have been some strange issues with email. I have had to dig quite deeply into the protocols and supporting services to make sure that any third party receiving mail from the mail servers we use have access to responses that show the mail server is legitimate.
For the most part 99.99% of it works without any issues. I have come across problems with BT accounts (all of the BT family) where changes have been made to their mail processing, suddenly things stop working or become intermittent. I use BT for my broadband, but I do not use my BT address because I know some mail may get filtered coming into it. The problem is you don’t know about it. I have never set up any filtering, so this is a BT unilateral decision. From time to time there have been issues with the Talk Talk family of addresses and AOL.
The reasons why these service providers are trying to filter mail is the sheer volume of junk mail that is around these days. Occasionally the wrong things are filtered. The rest of this post is about things you can try if you think mail is being filtered. Continue reading I did not receive your email…..
One of the things I try to provide is a one stop shop for email and for the website. While moving people over the past 6 weeks, it has become apparent that some people are still using 3rd party email systems. That is absolutely the right thing to do if you consciously set it up to work in that way. Particularly those of you that have moved to Outlook 365 which uses cloud based email.
However in a few cases I have found email is being used through a 3rd party provider, but nobody knows why. The issue here is you may be paying twice for hosting.
There is another case where people are using hotmail, yahoo or gmail accounts. Possibly because they did not realise they could use an email account with their domain name. Continue reading Some checks to make
Mail sent to fred@mycharity.com is forwarded to fred3123@gmail.com a standard gmail account
When fred sends a message from his gmail account it appears to come from fred@mycharity.com
Some people have a gmail account behind the email account associated with their domain. So for example fred@mycharity.com may not use the email boxes associated with the hosting. His email will be forwarded through to a gmail account say; fred3123@gmail.com
The reason for doing this may be for historical reasons, or perhaps you manage all of your folders in gmail. Or shared calendars with colleagues. There are pluses and minuses. The biggest risk with a gmail account is if you lose control of it. There is no “person” you can call to get it back.
Anyway, mail is routed to fred@mycharity.com and this is forwarded to fred3123@gmail.com. Fred manages his mail at Gmail, and when he replies to something, the message appears to come from fred@mycharity.com and not from fred3123@gmail.com. The way this is achieved is by using the SMTP server in your hosting package.
You do it by following these steps:
You will need an email account in your hosting, and a separate gmail account, and know the passwords for both. If you are setting this up for the first time, test both accounts independently. Once you have checked your email addresses and passwords do the following:
*mail.stackmail.com is the current default SMTP server we are using.
If you are using gmail as your main email provider and using the SMTP send function via the hosting, you need to remember that if I move a website into new hosting this will break your gmail implementation until you update the settings.
If you have just joined me you may have had a website with a different hosting company and are moving over to the managed services I provide. You will need to check your email configuration first and at the very least as a precaution back it up to an independent location.
Most organisations should be running a back up process such that the loss of a single computer or device would not mean you lose everything. Many in my experience are not, or do not know how to do this.
In this tutorial and the accompanying document below I show you how to check your mail configuration and run a backup for most of the recent versions of Outlook. The steps are outlined below, these need to be taken by you before the hosting is switched over because there is a risk you may lose your email if it is actually located on the server and not locally. This is called an IMAP account. You need to be using POP3 if I am providing your mail. Continue reading Backing up Outlook
Q: What is a group mail address?
A: A single mail address that when added to an email will automatically send the message to a group of recipients. It means you do not have to type in all of the email addresses each time.
I was recently asked how to set up a group email address in Outlook. The person requesting this wanted an easy way to send a message to all of the trustees rather than have to collect all of the email addresses together on the to: line of the mail form in Outlook.
While it is certainly possible to both set up and use a group email address, if your mail is not running on an exchange server, or Outlook 365 (which uses a shared area in the cloud) then nobody else can benefit from having a group mail address.
If you are sending out bulk emails (emails with lots of addresses in the header) then your mail may be the reason why a server is blacklisted. This area is a major problem because most mail is junk mail. Some speculate that as much as 80% of mail is junk mail or spam. Service providers use various methods of identifying rogue sources of mail, these systems are automated and do not always get it right.
You may be aware of BT related problems on a number of occasions over the past year. BT are now more helpfully providing a link in their mail rejection notice to some guidance on best practice for creating bulk emails.
You can read about it here: BT Best Practices for Bulk Mail. Continue reading Problems sending mail to BT (British Telecom) addresses?
The following applies to everyone that is using mail under your domain name that have not outsourced this function elsewhere. You will know if your mail comes from another provider, if you are using Office 365 for mail you are hosted elsewhere and this does not apply to you. The majority of people I host have their mail with me.
All mail accounts that are supported through wingrove-media should be configured as a POP3 account and not an IMAP account.
POP3 allows your mail box at the hosting to provide temporary storage of your email. Meaning mail is sent to you 24 x 7. It waits in your mail box on the server until you download it. At the point you download it, it should be removed from the server. So in other words your mail box will never fill up if you download it from time to time.
IMAP in its’ default configuration allows you to download mail to multiple devices and your mail is not stored locally but on the server. If you allow this to happen your mail box will rapidly fill up and cease to function. Worse than this, it may also affect your website if there is no more space in your hosting.
I use the mail systems in the hosting as well. In my case I have the following requirements:
I pick up mail on any or all of the following devices:
iPad, iPhone, Desktop, Laptop & MacBook. So 5 devices! I am clearly on the lunatic fringe. However my mailbox on the server does not fill up, but I can generally see the most recent mail on all devices.
I have one golden master account for everything. That is Outlook on my desktop PC which is what I use for most things. This account has Outlook set up so that it copies mail from the server and deletes it once it is 14 days old. It also deletes any mail I locally delete the next time I hook up.
All of the other devices are set up in the same way. This means that for most applications I have at least 2 weeks of mail on any device so even if I am on the road I can locate the most recent communications.
The hosting space allocated to you is not infinite. You are generally operating in 2-3GB of hosting space, and if anyone gets near to the limits I extend them to 4-5GB for free. However some people now have mailboxes that are full, or nearing full. When I advise you of this, you need to take action, if you do not take any action I cannot keep increasing the space available, you also run the risk of your website failing as there will not be enough space available for your site to run in.
One of the reasons this is happening is because you have used 3rd parties to set up email for you and they have used the wrong local configuration. They have set your local mail configuration to IMAP rather than POP3 which were the instructions I sent out when your account was set up.
Firstly check in Outlook to see what sort of account your mail is going to. Typically you can do that by doing the following depending on which version of Outlook you are using:
Go to File, Account Settings, (and Account Settings again) this will provide you with a list of the email accounts active on your system.
It will list the name and the TYPE of account. If your account is set up correctly it will show POP/SMTP if your mail is hosted with me.
Next you need to check if your mail is being deleted from the server. You can do that by first selecting the email account you want to check in the list if there is more than one. Then clicking on Change Account.
You will see three tabs present above a form. Click on the tab that says advanced and you will see a form similar to the one below:
The settings on this form should look similar to mine. However they are often overlooked. Pay attention to the items under delivery towards the bottom of the form.
After you download the messages to your selected mail client, if you want other devices to pick up a copy then check the box Leave a copy of the messages on the server. However do ensure that Remove from server after 7 or 14 days is checked. If you do not check that, the mail box on the server will fill up.
Also check the box Remove from the server when deleted from “deleted items”
These last steps are often overlooked by local tech support.
If your settings have now been corrected, but I have asked you to check your email please login to the webmail interface (http://mydomain.org.uk/webmail) in other words your home page plus /webmail/ added to the end. Login with your full email address and password.
Proceed to your mailbox and delete any unwanted mail in there. Start at the oldest mail first. This should resolve the problem.
It is possible to set up IMAP to keep most of your mail locally and not on the server but it needs setting up that way. You will need to seek support from the person that set it up for you. This is a local IT issue and nothing to do with your hosting. Better still seek support to convert your IMAP account to a POP3 account.
Pass the following to your local tech support person:
The email hosting provided for my account is limited to between 250MB and 500MB per email account. Please set up my email so that I can download it locally to my desktop/ laptop computer and confirm my account is configured as a POP3 Secure mail account and is removing mail from the server and not leaving it there.
To find out more about how your mail is set up and how you should be using it please start here: http://wingrove-services.co.uk/email/
If you are stuck please do contact me, but please bear in mind that my responsibility to you and your organisation does not extend to your local desktop support and generally speaking this is a desktop (mis)configuration problem.
I can provide more space, and if you find yourself in this position let me know. However I do not have unlimited resources. One thing to check is that it is possible to have several GB of storage with Gmail (Google Mail) and use your mail system with Google. If you do that I need to change some of the server settings for your domain. Everyone’s accounts will need to be running in Gmail. However you could then use this as an IMAP account if this is what you need. You will need to have a local technical support person available to you if you need to use this. I can look after the settings associated with your domain name.
In this case your mail is no longer provided by me.
Many people use Microsoft Outlook for their mail client in their full time jobs. If you are a home user, or your charity has a tight budget you may be relying on web based mail. There is another solution. It is not as feature rich as Outlook, however it is still a good program and it is free. It also runs on multiple platforms.
If you are running email out of your hosting with me there are several ways you can reach articles on this site that explains how to set up your email client.
Follow this link to find out more: No Outlook is no problem.