Configuring Your Email Client
There are essentially 2 types of email programs you will encounter with hosted mail: Webmail and Email clients. Some of us prefer to use webmail (Horde) when accessing our email accounts. Webmail is useful when traveling or when you don’t have access to your own computer, but Horde can cause delayed mail and is not designed to store large amounts of email. For this reason, I always suggest to our customers that they download and configure one of many free email clients. Windows computers now come preloaded with Windows Mail, which has a clean and familiar feel to it (the layout and navigation are very similar to Outlook). If you prefer to use another email client, here are a few links to some great free email clients:
Thunderbird
IncrediMail
Any of these will work for the purpose of downloading your email from our servers, and also allows you to organize and have a backup of your email messages on your local machine. For the configuring of these clients, you basically have two choices – configuring as POP3 or as IMAP. When using POP3 (most people’s preference), your email messages are downloaded from the server to your local computer. When using IMAP, your messages are stored on the server. Also worth noting, IMAP uploads and stores all sent messages to the server.
Most people will be setting up POP3 on their email client, and in this example we will be configuring Windows Mail, as it is preinstalled on most new Windows machines (both Vista and Windows 7).
First, start up windows mail. If you are not immediately prompted for a new email account setup, you will go to the Tools portion in the upper menu bar and select Accounts. Next you will click on Add and select the Email Account option.
You will be prompted for the Email Display Name, which will be any name by which you wish to refer to this particular email address (ie Personal Email, Business Email, etc). The next screen is self explanatory, as you will be entering the full email address that you wish to setup.
The next window will prompt you for your incoming and outgoing mail servers. Make sure to
leave the Outgoing server requires authentication unchecked! The incoming and outgoing server names are identical: mail.yourdomainname.com.
Once you’re done with inputting the mail server info, you’re ready to move on to the login configuration page. Here you will be prompted for the Email username and password. The username will be your *full* email address (ie me@mydomain.com). The password, of course, will be whatever you have chosen for that particular email address. Hit Next, then Finish, and you’re done!
If you are receiving an error when sending mail, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is probably blocking port 25. The blocking of this port has rather recently shifted towards the industry standard, in order to prevent spam from being sent from the mail servers. You will need to call your ISP for the correct port number, but you can temporarily input port 587 (temporary! please don’t leave this as your outgoing port unless your ISP specifies) and test your email. To change the port settings, click on Tools –> Accounts –> select Email account –> click Properties –> Advanced, and you will replace ’25′ with whatever port you have been provided. An efficient way to test your mail settings will be to send yourself an email; this will verify that both sending and receiving of email is functioning properly!
