Archive for the ‘Web Hosting Knowledgebase’ Category
SPAM Warning
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
With the number of email address compromised by the data breach at Epsilon, you can expect to receive a much larger volume of spam messages attempting to get you to reveal personal information. The media commonly refers to these kinds of messages as “phishing” or “spear phishing” messages. They look legitimate, and many appear to come from companies with whom you actually do business. The messages typically threaten to discontinue your account if you don’t click the link and follow the instructions. The senders of these kinds of messages are identify thieves and hope to get you to reveal enough personal information to let them hack into your accounts and steal your identity.
Delete any email message attempting to get you to click a link and/or supply any personal information.
Companies with whom you do business have no legitimate reason to ask you to supply personal information. They already have the personal information they need…you gave it to them when you originally set up your account or began doing business with them. You can feel certain that any email message asking for personal information is a fake.
Example: Some of our clients have received the following email message, which threatens to shut off your email service unless you click the link and enter personal information like your username, email login ID, password, date of birth, and a future password. The message contains several items that tip you off that it’s a fake.
1. It comes from Any messages you receive about your web site or email from us will come from an email address @everythingmacintosh.com. (, , , ).
2. Messages you get from us will be addressed to you personally, by name. We won’t send mass messages address to “Account User.”
3. We’ll never threaten to discontinue your service for failure to provide information. (We stop your service only if you call to cancel it or we fail to receive payment within a reasonable time after it’s due.)
If you ever have questions, forward a questionable email message to or call us at 800-916-9695 or 919-404-0222.
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How to Create an Autoresponder
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
Also called a Vacation Message or Away Message
When you won’t be checking and responding to email messages for a period of time it’s nice to let people know so they don’t feel ignored when they don’t receive an immediate response to messages they’ve sent you.
Autoresponders, also called vacation messages and away messages, send a message back to anyone who sends a message to you. If you’ve ever received a message saying,”I’ll be out of the office until Tueday and will respond to your message then,” you’ve received an autoresponder message.
Autoresponders are a standard feature for email hosted by Everything Macintosh. They’re easy to set up, modify, and delete as needed.
1. In the web browser, go to http://www.(your domain name)/webmail. Your domain name is the name of your web site, including the .com, .net, .org, or other extension. For example if your domain name is widgets.com, you’d go to http://www.widgets.com/webmail. The web browser will present a screen or window asking for your user ID and password.
Your user ID is your full email address, as in Your password is your email password…the same password that was entered into the email program on your computer when you first started using it. Once you’ve entered the user ID and password, click the OK button.
2. In the next screen (the same screen you’d see when checking you email using webmail), click the Auto Responders button.
3. In the Autoresponders window, click the Add Autoresponder button.
4. The Modify/Add Autoresponder window is where you create your autoresponder.
Leave the popup menu for Character Set at its default setting (ansi_x3.110-1983).
Leave the Interval (hours) field set to its default setting (8).
The Email field will already be preset to your email address.
In the From field, enter %from%. With that setting, the autoresponder will automatically fill in the sender’s name from the message to which it’s responding. If the sender’s message doesn’t include a name, the email address will be used.
In the Subject field, you could simply enter a subject like, “Out of office.” A better choice is to enter %subject%. With that setting, the autoresponder automatically fills in the subject from the message to which it’s responding.
Leave the HMTL Message box unclicked.
Enter your message in the Body field.
Finally, click the Create/Modify button to create your autoresponder.
5. You’ll see a confirmation screen. If you’re done, click the Logout button at the upper right corner of the window. But for the sake of this tutorial, this time click the Go Back link at the bottom of the window. That takes you back to the original webmail screen from step 2.
6. In the webmail window, click the Auto Responders button to get back to the Autoresponders window.
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Not Receiving Email From Some Senders?
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
A number of our clients have reported that they have not received email messages from one or two specific senders. All their other messages are arriving normally. Our clients think we’re blocking those sender’s messages, and they want us to troubleshoot the problem and unblock those senders. We don’t block any sender, so we were eager to find out what was causing the problem. Troubleshooting this issue wasn’t easy, but we finally figured out what the problem is.
Every email message has a unique ID number and includes information that lets us trace the time it was sent, the route it took through the internet to get to its destination (you), and the time you received it. As long as the message has actually been received at your mail server, we can use the information to track problems with that message. But if a message never even arrives at your mail server, we have no information at all…so where do we start? Here’s how we’ve determined what the problem is.
Email works like U.S. Postal Service mail. When somebody sends you an email message, it first travels from their computer to their outgoing mail server. (Just like a letter first goes from the mailbox at their house to their local post office.)
Their outgoing mail server attempts to make a direct connection to your incoming mail server to transfer the message. If the connection is successful, the message is transferred to your incoming mail server. It waits on your incoming mail server until you receive new messages, at which point it’s delivered to you. (Just like USPS trucks carry letters from senders’ post offices to your local post office, where the letter waits before you either pick it up or your letter carrier delivers it.)
If a sender’s outgoing mail server can’t establish a direct connection to your incoming mail server (because of excessive internet traffic or a problem in the internet’s infrastructure that prevents a direct connection), it tries to find a more indirect route that will allow it to deliver the message. (Just as USPS trucks sometimes have to detour in Winter to get around a heavy snow storm.)
If their mail server is unable to find a way to get the message to you, a “bounce” message is sent to the sender letting saying that their message could not be delivered, along with numerical and english explanation of why. (Just like your letter being returned to you with a rubber stamp or handwritten note explaining why it couldn’t be delivered).
We’ve examined the bounce messages from senders who were unable to successfully send messages to our clients and found a common thread. The error in every message was, “Unable to establish a connection,” and in every case, the problem was that the sender’s email was hosted by GoDaddy. We wondered why GoDaddy’s outgoing mail servers wouldn’t be able to establish a connection to our client’s incoming mail servers, since we use web standard POP3, IMAP, and SMTP mail servers.
We attempted to contact GoDaddy’s technical department to resolve the issue, but they were unwilling to speak with us because we’re not “GoDaddy email hosting customers.” So we began to do some web research to see whether anyone else was experiencing similar problems.
What we found is that GoDaddy’s outgoing email servers arbitrarily refuse to communicate with whole ranges of internet addresses for a period of time. Any mail server whose address falls within that range will not receive messages from any GoDaddy customer. The problem has been going on for years, and GoDaddy customers have been complaining to GoDaddy…but the problem hasn’t stopped. We’ve included pictures of a number of the posts we found of various forums and blogs about this issue.
We don’t understand why GoDaddy would allow their mail servers to prevent their own email customers from sending messages to whoever they choose. After all, that’s precisely the service their customers are paying the monthly fee for, isn’t it?
Unfortunately GoDaddy is the only one who can resolve this problem. They are the only one with control over their mail servers. GoDaddy customers who find themselves unable to get messages through to one or a few other people should immediately insist that GoDaddy fix the problem.
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Ajax Error when Managing Email Accounts
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
Solution: This happens in Safari. Use FireFox instead.
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Entourage Not Working? Let’s Fix It!
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Sometimes that file can become damaged, which causes problems when Entourage tries to launch, display, and receive messages. Follow these instructions to repair the database and also delete all the deleted messages…which makes the Database smaller, faster, and easier to manage.
1. If Entourage is running, click Quit in the File menu.
2. Hold down the Command and Option keys on the keyboard and launch Entourage. Keep holding down the keys. Instead of launching Entourage, this should launch the Database Utility.
4. Click the button for Compact database, then click the Continue button. Database Utility creates a brand new, blank Database file, renames your old damaged file, copies all the undeleted data from the old file to the new, then creates an index within the new file to make all your messages and data easy for Entourage to find.
5. When Database Utility has completed compacting your Database, the Compact Status window indicates that it’s complete. Click the Done button to close Database Utility and continue to your Entourage main window.
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Spam Control
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
There are two separate spam control filters available on your mail server, SpamAssassin and Filtering. Here’s a description of how each works and how to configure them.
SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin scans each incoming message for qualities that are typical of spam messages, and assigns a numerical point score to each spam-like quality it finds in the message. You configure the sensitivity of SpamAssassin by setting a target number of points. Messages that score at or above the number you set are treated as spam. Messages that score below that number are not.
SpamAssassin works on all the email accounts on your mail server. Here’s how to configure SpamAssassin.
1. In your web browser, go to (your domain name)/cpanel.
Your domain name is the full name of your web site, including .com, .org, .net, or any other extension. (For example, if your domain name is widgets.com, you’d go to http://www.widgets.com/cpanel).
You’ll get a box in which to enter the administrator’s name and password, then click the Login button.
2. You’ll come to the control panel screen (abbreviated cPanel). Click on the SpamAssassin button.
3. In the SpamAssassin window, click on the Configure SpamAssassin button at the lower left corner.
4. The SpamAssassin Configuration window contains several sections. If you’re configuring SpamAssassin for the first time, just enter the target score you want and click the Save button at the bottom of the window. We recommend starting with a value of 8.0, then seeing whether your spam decreases over the next day or two. If not, come back to this window and lower the target score a point at a time until your spam seems under control…then raise it half a point. If you then find that a few legitimate messages don’t come through, raise the number another half or whole point.
Enter the target number of points at or above which a message will be treated as spam. You can enter whole numbers and tenths of numbers (like 8.5 or 6.2). The lower the number, the more messages will be treated as spam.
Many legitimate message have spam-like qualities, so if you set the number too low those could be mistaken for spam. For example, a message that contains a big graphic with very little text is spam-like. Many spam messages for Viagra, Cialis, and other ED drugs have nothing but a picture that includes the drug name. Spammers do that because even though those words look like text, they’re actually just dots in the picture, so filters that look for the text Viagra or Cialis don’t pick them up. A message like that will be assigned the point value for a big graphic with little text, but the message could also be a legitimate message in which somebody you know sent you a picture.
Blacklist From
In this section you can add email addresses and domain names from whom you never want to receive messages. Any incoming message from those addresses or domains will be treated as spam regardless of their point score.
Score
This section lets you assign custom point values to spam-like qualities. We recommend leaving this section alone unless you’re very familiar with how SpamAssassin works. The default settings work well.
Whitelist From
The whitelist is the opposite of the blacklist. Email addresses and domain names entered here will never be treated as spam no matter what their score is.
5. This takes you back to the original SpamAssassin window. Click the Enable SpamAssassin button to turn SpamAssassin on. Then, under Filters, set the popup menu for Score to match the number you entered in the configuration window, then click the Auto-Delete Spam button.
6. Click the Logout button at the upper right corner of the window to leave the cpanel.
Filtering
Filtering looks for words (or combinations of characters) you specify in each incoming message. You can specify an action to take if the words are found (like discard the message). You can set up filtering that affects all the email accounts on your mail server, or that affects only individual accounts.
Account Level Filtering works on all the email addresses on your mail server…it affects everyone’s email. User Level Filtering works on individual email addresses.
Account Level Filtering
1. In your web browser, go to (your domain name)/cpanel.
Your domain name is the full name of your web site, including .com, .org, .net, or any other extension. (For example, if your domain name is widgets.com, you’d go to http://www.widgets.com/cpanel).
You’ll get a box in which to enter the administrator’s name and password, then click the Login button.
2. You’ll come to the control panel screen (abbreviated cPanel). Click on the Account Level Filtering button to create filters that affect all email addresses, or click on User Level Filtering to create filters that affect individual email addresses.
If you click on User Level Filtering, continue to step 3. If you click on Account Level Filtering, skip to step 4.
4. In the Edit Filters window, you’ll see the list of existing filters. To create a new filter, click the Create a New Filter button.
5. In the New Filter window enter a name for this new filter. (In the attached example, I used Delete Tarot.)
In the Rules section of the window, set the first popup menu for the place you want to search (From, Subject, To, Reply Address, Body, Any Header, Any Recipient, Has not been previously delivered, Is an error message). I most frequently use From, Subject, and Body.
Set the second popup menu for how you want the filter to compare the text you enter to the text in the message (equals, matches regex, contains, does not contain, begins with, does not begin with, ends with, does not end with, does not match).
Enter the text you want to compare. In the example I entered tarot.
You can add additional related rules by clicking the + button.
In the attached example, I wanted to look for the word tarot in both the subject and the body. First I configured a rule that says “Subject contains tarot,” then I clicked the + button and created a second rule that says “Body contains tarot.” The two rules are linked together by the or (in a popup menu that appears only when you have multiple rules set up). In this example, a message will match this filter if either the subject or the body contains the word tarot, and also if both contain the word. If I changed the or to and, the subject and body would both have to contain tarot to match the rule.
In the Actions section, select the action you want done to messages that match the rule. I usually use Discard Message.
Click the Activate button to activate the new filter.
Repeat for any additional filters you want to add.
5. Click the Logout button at the upper right corner of the window.
Another Way to Access User Level Filtering
Individual email users can create and edit their own user level filters within the same screen through which they access webmail. Here’s how:
1. In your web browser, go to (your domain name)/cpanel.
Your domain name is the full name of your web site, including .com, .org, .net, or any other extension. (For example, if your domain name is widgets.com, you’d go to http://www.widgets.com/cpanel).
You’ll get a box in which to enter the user’s email address and password, then click the Login button.
2. You’ll come to the webmail screen, where typically you’d choose among the three webmail readers we support: Horde, RoundCube, and SquirrelMail. To create or edit filters, click the Email Filtering button. That takes you to the Edit Filters window for this particular email address.
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Help Us Troubleshoot Email Problems
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
You start the trip by going to your local airport, which is your starting point.
Outgoing email messages first go to the outgoing mail server, which is their starting point.
Once you’re at your starting point, you wait in the terminal for your plane to board before you can actually begin your trip. If your plane is late arriving, or had a mechanical problem that delays boarding, your trip takes longer than expected.
An email message waits on the outgoing mail server until it can hand off that message to another mail server, usually the recipient’s incoming mail server. If the outgoing mail sever is unable to make a connection with the next mail server to which a message is traveling, the message will take longer to be received than expected.
If your plane trip is a direct route, you need only worry about whether traffic is on time at your departure and arrival airports. But if your trip involves stops and layovers, you also have to worry about delays at each additional airport where you stop. Delays, equipment failures, or the unavailability of equipment at any of those airports can delay or cancel the next leg of your trip. Of course thiis happens more frequently for long distance or international travel than for local travel.
An email message that has to travel a long distance may be handed off to intermediate mail servers (we call them relay mail servers) before it reaches the recipient’s incoming mail server. There is always the potential for each of those servers to experience a delay because of unusually high email traffic (usually caused by a spam attack) or a malfunction. Whenever that happens, it delays the delivery of email messages. In addition, some relay mail servers may be set (by their owners) to delete or return to the sender messages it identifies as spam (or messages that contain a virus or worm). If that server returns the message to the sender, the sender will receive a “bounce” message saying that the message could not be delivered, and usually including information about the specific mail server that rejected the message, the time, and the reason. If the server is set to delete such messages, the sender will not know the message was never delivered, and recipient won’t know either.
If Everything Macintosh Web Hosting (or EM Web Hosting) hosts your web site and/or email, we have control over your outgoing mail and incoming mail servers. We can not only troubleshoot, but also directly resolve delays and deleted messages caused by malfunctions in those servers. The outgoing and incoming mail servers of people to whom you send messages are controlled by whoever hosts their web site and/or email, and the relay mail servers that are part of the internet’s infrastructure are owned by other companies like AT&T, WorldNet, Cisco, etc. We have no direct control over servers owned by other companies, but we’ll always work with you and those companies to troubleshoot delays and deleted messages.
In troubleshooting delayed or deleted messages, the first step is to determine which mail server was responsible. In order to do that, we need a copy of either the delayed message, with its long mail headers displayed, or the bounce message, with its long mail headers displayed. The email headers are the part of a message contains the From, the To, the Subject…which most email programs will display. They also include the unique message ID number, and a running list of all the email servers through which that message has passed in its travel from the sender to the recipient, including arrival and departure times at each mail server. Most email programs don’t display that information because it would take up lots of room on screen, and few users care to see it. But that information tells us which mail server has caused a delay. If the delay was caused on a server we control, we can inspect the operation logs for that server at the time the message was there to see why the delay occurred…and take corrective action if there is a problem. If the delay occurs on a server owned by someone else, we alert them to the problem, which gives them the information they need to resolve it.
This tech note describes how to cause the long mail headers to appear in a delayed or bounce message and send a copy of that message to us. As soon as we receive it, we’ll begin tracing the problem. We’re grateful for your help.
How You Can Help Us Troubleshoot Delays
Every email message that travels through the internet has a unique identification number, and a log of each mail server through which it passed…including the time it arrived at that server, and the time it left. That information is invaluable to us in identifying why messages are taking longer than they should to arrive. The information is contained in the “headers” of the email messages, along with the To, From, Date Sent, and Subject of the message.
Knowing that most people don’t care to trace the progress of their messages through the internet, most email programs display only the “short headers” of messages. That includes the To, From, Date Sent, and Subject. To see the long headers, you usually have to manually select a particular message and click a menu command.
We need those long headers to trace the progress of a delayed message through the internet and determine where delays occurred. That also allows us to determine the level of incoming traffic at your mail server when the message arrived. Here we’ll tell you how to cause the long headers to display for a specific message. Once they’re showing, simply select the whole message, copy it, and past it into a new message addressed to One message is good, between two and four delayed messages are better.
If you’re using Apple’s Mail program, make sure the text of the delayed message is showing in the Mail window. Then, under the View menu drag down to Message, and click Long Headers in the submenu. That will cause the long headers to appear at the top of the message. Highlight all the text of the message, including the long headers, copy it, and paste it into a new message addressed to
ENTOURAGE
If you’re using Microsoft Entourage, select the message in the Inbox. Click on Source in the View menu. A new window will contain full headers and message text. Select all the text in this window, copy it, and paste it into a new message addressed to
OUTLOOK 2002
In Outlook 2002, right-click the message without opening it, then click Options from the drop-down menu. A box called Message Options pops up. Near the bottom of the box you’ll see a text area titled Internet headers. Highlight the contents, then right-click. Copy the headers and paste them into a new message addressed to
OUTLOOK 2000
Right click on the message without opening it. Select Options, then Full Headers. Highlight and copy the entire message, with the long headers, and paste it into a new message addressed to
OUTLOOK 98
Open the message and select View, then Options from the drop-down menus. Near the bottom of the screen you’ll see a section titled INTERNET HEADERS. Copy the headers and paste them into a new message addressed to
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Access Your Email from Any Computer with Webmail
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Here’s how to use our Webmail feature. For the examples, we’ll use the website domain.com and the email address When you actually use Webmail, substitute your own website domain and email address.
1. In the web browser, go to http://www.(your domain name)/webmail. Your domain name is the name of your web site, including the .com, .net, .org, or other extension. For example if your domain name is widgets.com, to check webmail you’d go to http://www.widgets.com/webmail. The web browser will present a screen or window asking for your user ID and password.
Your user ID is your full email address, as in Your password is your email password…the same password that was entered into the email program on your computer when you first started using it. Once you’ve entered the user ID and password, click the OK button.
2. The next screen offers you a choice of three online email programs. These are web-based programs that work through any web browser that allow you to view, respond, create, attach, and send email. Horde, SquirrelMail, and Round Cube all have the similar features, but each has its own look. Try all 3, then stick with the one that feels most comfortable. To select one, just click on its icon to go to your InBox in that program.
4. You’re taken to the InBox screen. (For this illustration I used SquirrelMail).
The webmail window is very similar to your computer email program. All the standard features are here: composing new messages, reading, replying, forwarding, and deleting messages, adding attachments, and saving contact info in the address book. Like in your computer email program, you can create folders in which to store messages.
To exit Webmail, click Sign Out, then quit the web browser.
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Creating and Modifying Email Accounts
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Your domain name is the full name of your web site, including .com, .org, .net, or any other extension. (For example, if your domain name is widgets.com, you’d go to http://www.widgets.com/cpanel).
When you get to your web site’s control panel, click the Email Accounts button.
2. UPPER PART OF THE EMAIL ACCOUNTS WINDOW
You create new email accounts in the upper portion of the Email Accounts window. To create a new email account, enter an email name in the Email field (notice that the @ and your domain name are already visible to the right of the field, so you don’t need to enter them). Then enter the password for this new email account twice…once in the Password field, then again in the Password (again) field. Next, click the Unlimited button in the Mailbox Quota field. Finally, click the Create Account button. You’ve now created the new email account.
Note: I’ll talk about the Strength field, Password Generator button, and other settings for the Mailbox Quota field a little later in this tutorial.
The Strength field gives you an indication of how secure the password you’ve entered is. In other words, how difficult would it be for a hacker to figure out the password, making it possible to read the messages for this email account. Whether or not you need a hacker-resistant password is up to you.
If messages for this email account will contain sensitive information, you should probably use a reasonably secure password. The problem is that in most cases, the more secure the password, the more difficult it is to remember…and you must know your password to access email. So you need to strike a balance between security and memorable.
You can design reasonably secure, yet memorable, passwords by using a word made up of both upper and lower case letters, substituting the number one for a lower case L or I, and adding an underscore, period, or question mark.
Password Generator button
The Password Generator button will generate very secure passwords…just click the button and a window appears displaying the suggested password. A password like xL@Aa=27+9dy is virtually unhackable…I’d never be able to remember or guess it.
You can configure how difficult a password will be generated by clicking Advanced Options in the window. To use the suggested password, click the Use Password button…that will automatically enter the suggested password in both the Password and Password (again) fields.
Mailbox Quota
Each email address for your web site has its own mailbox, stored as part of your web site. When a new message arrives for a particular email account, it’s stored in the mailbox for that email address, taking up space on your web site. Then, when you receive the new messages in your computer’s email program, the program deletes the received messages from the mailbox on the site, making space for more new messages.
The Mailbox Quota lets you control the maximum size that any individual mailbox can be. If you select Unlimited as the quota for an email account, the maximum size of incoming messages to that email address is limited only by the available space on your web site. If you set a specific maximum size, that mailbox can never store or receive messages totaling more than your specified size.
3. LOWER PART OF THE EMAIL ACCOUNTS WINDOW
Accounts that have already been created appear in the list at the lower part of the Email Accounts window. For each account, the Usage/Quota column tells you how many megabytes of space is currently occupied in that mailbox on your web site, and what the maximum size of the mailbox is. So, in the illustration above, the mailbox for (the first email address) is using no space out of a maximum of 250 MB (megabytes). The mailbox for (third in the list) is using no space, but has a maximum size of 20MB. The other two mailboxes are also using no space, and their maximum size is unlimited.
To the right of the User/Quota column is the Actions column. Here you can change passwords, change the quota (maximum size of the mailbox), and delete the account.
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