Setting Up Email clients with our mail servers

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Although we do not have a lot of hosting clients who are using our built-in email services, some do, so this is a brief introduction to setting up your email account on your desktop client ---

In general these rules will apply to any desktop client, although we highly recommend Thunderbird on most platforms.

Your client will ask you to configure both an account for receiving email, and an account for sending mail. The receiving account will be retrieving email from the server either by using the POP3 protocol or by using IMAP. We recommend using IMAP and kieeping your email (or at least your current set of email) on the server. To do this, you would configure IMAP on your mail client with the following parameters:

Receiving email:

Mail server --- this would be mail.whateveryourdomainis. So, for example, if you were the cruiskeenconsulting.com email domain, you would set up to receive your email via POP3 or IMAP from the server mail.cruiskeenconsulting.com.

Protocol -- You will want to either set up to receive your email in the clear (that is, without encrypting your password, which will usually be referred to as using PLAIN authentication, or just "normal password". You may also set up to use the STARTTLS protocol to encrypt your email connection. You will in this case STILL be using the PLAIN or normal password setting -- but using STARTTLS will encrypt your traffic for reading your mail.

Port -- In either case you will want to use port 143, the standard IMAP port, to receive your email.

User name -- your user name will be the name that is shown when you set up your email account on the server. Typically this will look like your user name followed by your domain name -- in my case it would be shanson.cruiskeenconsulting.com -- this is the name you will use to sign in to the mail server, and you will use the password you assigned to the account name when you set it up.

Sending email -

To send out email from your mail client you will also need to set up an SMTP, or email sending account. Currently we are not supporting any form of encryption for SENDING email, though we will be changing this later in 2012.

User name -- this will be the same user name you used when setting up retrieving email

Password -- this will also be the same password you set up for retrieving email

Server -- this will be the same server name you set up for retrieving email.

You will at the moment want to use port 587 to send email. Port 25 will also work, but most ISP's block sending of email on port 25 these days, so you will probably find using port 587 to be much more likely to work.

You will currently want to set your email sending to send mail with no encryption, and to send your password in the clear (with no encryption). We will be addressing this some time in January 2012 to provide you with a more secure email environment.

As always, if you're having trouble with this, please send an email in to the helpdesk at helpdesk@cruiskeenconsulting.com, and let us know which email client you are trying to set up.

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