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How NeatClubs.COM manages your e-mail
Normally E-mail accounts will be setup for you when your web-site is configured.
NeatClubs offers flexibility in terms of how e-mail accounts are managed.
We wish the world of e-mail was simpler, but it's become a complex topic as mail providers introduce increasing complexity to combat the menace of SPAM.
NeatClubs.COM mail accounts can handle e-mail in the following ways:
| 1. | We can forward e-mail from an e-mail address hosted on your web-site domain to your personal e-mail address (as an example, "inquiries@mycompany.com" might be simply re-directed to your personal mail account). |
| 2. | We can provide you with a hosted POP3 or IMAP4 mailbox to receive e-mail and you can continue to send e-mail through your ISP's SMTP server. We can provide SPAM filtering using this as well approach, but we would recommend that you use a client mail program like Microsoft Outlook that has an additional level of strong spam filtering. We can also allow you access to web-mail using this approach as well through the web interface http://webmail.mycompany.com. Your login to web-mail will be your e-mail address and your password will be the password that we provide you with. |
| 3. | We can provide you a POP3 or IMAP4 mailbox to receive e-mail and additionally provide you with access to our secured SMTP servers for sending outgoing mail. This third approach can be complicated a little depending on the policies of your ISP. This third approach also supports SPAM filtering and web-mail. It is the same as approach #2 above except that we provide you with both SMTP and POP3/IMAP services. |
Features of NeatClubs.COM hosted e-mail (options "2" and "3" describe above) include:
| 1. | Up to 5 Hosted POP3 or IMAP4 mail accounts |
| 2. | “Forwarding” to existing personal e-mail accounts (our preferred solution in most cases) |
| 3. | Mailing list support (i.e. registration-info@myclub.com where this address re-directs to multiple people) |
| 4. | Webmail support allowing access to your hosted e-mail accounts e-mail from any browser |
| 5. | Optional SPAM filtering (based on SPAMAssassin) |
| 6. | Configurable SPF records (available only when we manage your DNS records) |
| 7. | Direct access via PLESK to your mail account administration (so you can manage your e-mail accounts yourself) |
We unfortunately can no longer allow auto-responders. The use of auto-responders compromises the integrity of our mail services by leaving our servers open to fraudulent activities where hackers identify responders and forge e-mail headers is such a manner as to propagate SPAM.
Our Preferred Approach to E-Mail Hosting
We recommend that our customers considering using their own existing ISP (approach #1 described above) to host e-mail for a variety of reasons.
Some of these reasons are:
| • | Your ISP is likely to have superior SPAM filtering compared to what we offer. |
| • | Many ISPs for security reasons will block attempts to connect to port 25 (the standard SMTP port) or port 587 in some cases (the alternate authenticated port for outgoing mail) and they will provide secure mechanisms for you to initiate e-mail as if it were coming from another domain. Allowing you to originate e-mail from a company web-address like "address@mycompany.com" to even though you are sending e-mail from your personal ISP (Rogers/Yahoo allows this for example). |
| • | The ISP mail service is likely to be faster since connecting to it will likely involve fewer network "hops". |
| • | In the event of a problem with your e-mail, it is much more straightforward to troubleshoot mail with one supplier rather than two. |
| • | Your customers will never know the difference anyway. |
Most systems can be configured so that you can still use your personal ISP e-mail account, but still originate e-mail as if it were coming from your own domain. This solution works well, but may require that we help you setup Sender Policy Framework records - setting up SPF records can be a little tricky and we can help if need be as long as we have control of your domain settings.
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