Email hosting, no stamps attached

POP

Best when you will be primarily accessing your email from a single location, like your office or home. When you leave your office or home, you can still access your email from a web browser.

Messages are downloaded to your computer, so you don’tneed to worry about exceeding the size of your mailbox.

When accessing your email account through a web browser, you may not see previous messages that were downloaded to your desktop email client.

IMAP

Best when you will be accessing your email from multiple locations.

Allows you to create portable folders. These folders will appear in each email client you use to access your account. Your account will look the same at work, at home, and at your friend’s house.

Because your email messages are stored on the server, you must monitor your mailbox size and delete messages to avoid exceeding your mailbox size.

Gmail just announced the unique new features, which expect to solve the problem of forget-to-logout, especially when you using public computers.

One need not to be unsured again! You can check your status from your Gmail, and logout any session if you want. How I wish I have one for my mum for her kettle, so we won’t have to turn back half way everytime when we are going somewhere.

You are using email clients such as Outlook or Outlook Express. Your notebook is not with you, and you have some old email to retrieve from your Webmail. The default setting in Outlook Express download all messages from the incoming mail server and remove them from server. That means, it leave no copy of messages in the server. If, you have huge space and you might run into some similiar case above, check ‘Leave a copy…’. It can help!

Just one thing, keeping too many email in your email server, might slow down your Outlook Express. Everytime when you download the message from the server, it takes some little longer time to initiate.

You have something to discuss, but your team members are scattered in different locations, working on different timezone… One good thing I like about discussion through email is, a loose questions get the feedback from those who has time for a quick reply. This can in fact, save time in face-to-face meeting, yet proven to be more productive. For sure, this might not work in all cases, especially if the team members are not used to this. This is an culture to nurture.

The one and only reason - this can only happen when you have lost the ownership of your domain name (the address after ‘@’). Therefore, remember to renew your domain name.

If you are using Free webmail service such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Theoretically, you have no rights to their domain name, you can be removed from owning any mailbox on violation of their terms.

TM, in their official press release described the act to block all 3rd party as one of the step to fight Spam. Following this, most of the companies in Malaysia who is using Streamyx broadband are affected after switching to smtp-proxy.tm.net.my. Problem including email delay and lost.

One of the latest updates I have received is, email delivered / delayed through smtp-proxy.tm.net.my is also marked as Spam by many major free email service provider including Yahoo Mail!

For those who wish to change to new corporate-branded email address, but still wish to receive a copy of email sent to your jaring mailbox, you can write officially and fax to Jaring, together with your request printed on your letterhead. I have done once, and they responce and it works! Just to share, I am not too sure if are still doing this for their users?

TM recently blocked all external SMTP except their own has forced everyone to switch and start using their SMTP. They claimed that this is one way for them to flight against Spam.

I am not sure to what extend this can help flighting Spam, but it has becoming a bottleneck now. The TM new rules block only port 25. Therefore, Spammer can still change their SMTP to different port and continue the so-called spamming activities.

But, true is - TM’s SMTP was no longer able to handle the increasing load of email delivering requests. Email delay problem occurs from 5 hours to a day.

Check your SMTP, if it points to smtp-proxy.tm.net.my, then you might want to consider printing out your email and send by Post, it could anytime faster :)

1. Make sure your mailbox space can cope with this. When come to estimating the storage space you should have at least, do include days when you don’t access your email, especially during your holidays.

2. Handling your email become a nightmare when averagely you have at least more than 100 emails a day. Email clients or webmail without Conversation view can be a setback now. Slow webmail can cause serious problem too! Keyboard shortcut of email clients can move you further with extreme increase of email loads!

3. Reducing your email. This is the hard part! Online business is about Testing. New marketing plan and features on your website, are introduced in a faster pace. Testing means you are learning everyday. Without sharing of email, this can be a problem.

Do you expect the built-in camera better than a SLR camera?

If your email is bundling with your web hosting now, then please expect just a built-in camera quality of email service!

Malaysia Email Hosting Benchmark

Most web hosting companies offer email as a checklist item—something they spend very little time on. And while email hosting drives probably less than 1% of revenue for most of them, it likely drives up to 50% of support. What a bummer!

Most web hosting companies bundling email hosting (and use the magic word unlimited mailbox) as one of the feature in their web hosting package. You can google web hosting malaysia and you will be surprised how many of them are still bundling both.

Well, keyword like email hosting malaysia are seldom used even the customers are looking for email solution. This is weird, isn’t it.

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What happen when you try to send an email to 50 recipients? Send it one by one? Or dump all the 50 email addresses in a single email? Neither of them is a good solution. If you are sending one by one, it might take up to hours. If you do it the other way, most probably your email will be treated as spam or even block by your email hosting service provider. In this case, GroupMail could be a good help.

With the great grouping feature in GroupMail, you are allowed to categorize your email recipients into groups. Instead of sending email to a single email address, you are now allowed to send an email to groups of recipients.

Besides, you can also set a schedule using GroupMail. It is very useful if you are going to send a reminder. After the template and the schedule is ready, you can leave the rest to GroupMail.

Last but not least, you can still send the email using your own email account. You can have your email accout setup in GroupMail. However, it is strongly recommended to set an interval for the mass mailing task. You can limit it to one email in every 10 seconds or maybe 30 seconds to ensure that your email hosting provider do not yell at you for occupying their email server.

If you are upgrading from Outlook Express to Windows Mail, you might need this helpful instruction posted by JAF.

1. Create a directory under the current user’s Documents, such as Documents\OEMail. This directory needs to be within the user’s space, such as under Documents, in order to prevent possible access permissions problems.
2. Copy all the dbx files from one Outlook Express Identity into this directory, ensuring that folders.dbx is included.
3. Go to Edit | Select all in Windows Explorer and select all the dbx files. Then right click on the selection and choose Properties and ensure that the read only attribute of the files is unchecked.
4. In Windows Mail go to File | Import Messages and choose Outlook Express 6 format and choose to import from a directory.
5. Then use the Browse button to browse to the directory of dbx files. Make sure that when you set the directory that what is listed in the path is correct (NOTE: Vista can put the wrong path in here sometimes, so instead of c:\mypath it puts c:\mypath\mypath, so check the path to verify that it is correct, and if it is not correct then fix it by clicking the Browse button a second time and then leave the selection blank and clicking Okay.).
6. Then select the files from which you wish to import messages and click Import.

Last two months, TM announced to block the use of any external SMTP server. Subscribers of Streamyx broadband must change their SMTP address to smtp-proxy.tm.net.my. According to TM, this is to fight SPAM (I doubt this has anything to do with it…).

With all email users using TM’s STMP to deliver their email messages, something finally goes wrong!

TM’s SMTP is overloaded at last! The large amount of email going through this outgoing email server finally bring it down and all email users are having problem now especially most of their email does not deliver immediately. This nightmare starts this week. As usual, TM is not giving any notice on this issues.

Use Gmail as alternate SMTP server

You have decided to change your email domain, from abc.com to xyz.com. You want all email sent to abc.com to be forwarded to xyz.com.

This can be done with no cost by changing your DNS to Zoneedit, one of the free DNS service provider. Login to your Zoneedit account and look for Mail Forwarding section. Use ‘*’ to catch all names before @abc.com! Email forwarding at DNS level can be done without using any email server, but with less control.

Read more What is Email Alias?

I have came across many big name companies, spending hundred of thousands setting up their in-house mail server using Exchange Mail Server. Instead of outsourcing, these companies spent extra time and money to maintain their email facilities.

No doubt Exchange is great, but that is wen you know how to fine-tunning it. Most of the businesses are not able to keep themselves updated especially when come to Exchange upgrade, patching of Spams & viruses, configuring for best performance…

Just like any other business, email is one of the most important tools for your business. Let the experts (a team of people, not a single in-house IT staff) to do the job for you, and you can stay focus in your business!

Gmail charge nothing, yet providing one of the best Webmail interface by putting usability and intuitiveness into maximun, just like iPhone.

Meanwhile, business email hosting service providers offering hosted email solution for businesses at range of pricing that makes you really confuse. Outside, it is like an apple-to-apple comparison except the very huge price difference.

What is inside the Apple?

Busy mail server tends to delay email more slowly. Ideally (this happen to those fast mail server), your email once sent should reach the recipient given everything working in place. A healty mail server should not have long mail queue so that they can process your email almost immediately.

Also, if you have out-of-control of mailbox users in a single mail server, that can cause excessive loading to the mail server. The more users on Webmail, send & receiving at the same time, this can cause delay to the server.

Just one thing, the performance of the recipient mail server can be another factor of slow email. If you are sure the recipient side is running fast enough yet still receive delayed email, this is the sign that your own mail server is having some problem!

Bosses in Australia will soon be authorized with a new power on their workforce- the ability to scan every emails that is sent and received through their organisation’s email server.

The Sydney Morning Herald quotes the following…

COMPANIES will be able to intercept the emails and internet communications of their employees without their consent under new laws being considered by the Federal Government to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure from a cyber attack.

The proposed powers, which the Government wants in place by the middle of next year and which could affect millions of workers, have been slammed as an unprecedented and unjustifiable intrusion on civil liberties.

The Government is developing counter-measures, including amending the Telecommunications (Interceptions) Act to allow companies and others operating critical infrastructure to monitor emails and other internet communications without their workers’ consent.

The act allows only security agencies to monitor their employees’ communications without consent. That power expires at the end of June next year and Mr McClelland said he wanted the new legislation to include companies providing services critical to the economy.

In Malaysia, there’s no laws or acts protecting the employees’ privacy. Yes, every emails that you received and sent via your company’s email address is possibly being read by your boss right now.

I always believe that email hosting package with unlimited mailbox is over promising, too real to be true marketing teasers. At first, it seems to be all working fine. You pay RM199 and create as many as email user you want. I came across Listed Company hosting all their 200 users with unlimited package - paying as little as 8 cent per user per month! Yes, unbelievable!

Without limiting number of users in any mail server, it goes beyong control. Too many users means an increasing email load to both incoming and outgoing mail server. You start to experience email sending delay and having intermittent downtime problems.

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“I tried to delete email from Outlook Express but fail. It says Messages could not be moved”

The email folder where you want to delete the email was corrupted. This happens to users with Outlook Express with many emails all kept in the Inbox, or when your PC is not formated and used for quite a while.

Outlook Express keeps all email in DBX format. This file get corupted easily. Go to the Tools > Options > Maintenance > Store Folder to know where is your DBX file. Delete the DBX, but make sure you have turn off Outlook Express and move your message to different folder. Open Outlook Express again and it will generate the new DBX. Now, move the email back to Inbox.

If you are moving from Windows XP to the latest Vista, Microsoft rebrand and remove Outlook Express and call it Windows Mail now :)

Malicious virus can generate large amount of email sending out from the infected PC. If the PC is inside your corporate LAN, it can bring down the upload speed of your connection in your office. This means, you might easily get a ‘Can not connect SMTP server’ error message through your email client.

If the virus uses your SMTP to do the attack, your SMTP should have awared of this. In this case, the useful Email report come into the picture

The number of email with virus (the script trying to spread itself to more people in order to launch DoS attack at a same time) captured was relatively high.

Using the name of virus, you can do a tracing of this virus inside your corporate LAN.

Hargopal wrote an insightful article on how TM’s unintelligent technical department decided to clamp down on Port 25 (the port where all StreamyX users use to send out emails).

What this means is that if you have subscribed to a Personal Streamyx account, or a Business Broadband (SOHO Package), you may experience problems with sending out emails with the default settings of port 25, especially if you are sending out emails using your own domain name.

If your customers frequently complain of not receiving your emails, this could be a tell tale sign. Users who are using their Streamyx email accounts may not be affected (example@streamyx.com) by this, since it involves emails on hosted domains (eg info@hosteddomain.com).

Personally, I experienced problems with sending out emails from my locally hosted and foreign hosted domains on port 25 and that is when I discovered this countermeasure by TM Net. In my case, my host Webserver has provided an alternative port, 587 for SMTP and this works much more reliably compared to port 25 (since TM Net is performing heavy filtering on this port). Therefore, it is advisable to contact your web host to find out if they have any alternative ports you can use for SMTP, especially if you experience slowness in sending emails.

This has caused major problems with all StreamyX users who are using email hosting services that is tied to Port 25.

I’ve got no problem with TM going about their spam-reducing activities, but heck, they shouldn’t do that on the expenses of the users email hosting services, which is causing a major customer support disaster worldwide!

TM Malaysia, practice some common sense in whatever you do!

“Construction underway to build 10,000 km linear cable system with a capacity of up to 7.68 Tbps to enhance Trans-Pacific connectivity”

A consortium of six international companies announced they have executed agreements to build a high-bandwidth subsea fiber optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The construction of the new Trans-Pacific infrastructure will cost an estimated US$300 million.

The new cable system – named Unity – will address broadband demand by providing much needed capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States. Unity is expected to initially increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.

“1 out of every 10 notebook (laptop) computeres will be stolen within the first 12 months of purchase. 90% of them will never be recovered. -FBI Statistic-”

Apart from the data security breach, losing all your email without backup can be a serious business interruption!

Lucky This Time?

Outlook or Outlook Express are both email clients that allow you to download your email from the mail server to your computer, instead of browsing it online using Webmail.

Email to you are stored in the mail server. Email clients connect to this mail server (we call it Incoming mail server, eg pop.emailsrvr.com) and download the email. After downloading, the email will no longer available in the mail server, unless you have enabled the option ‘Leave copy of email in mail server for xxx days’.

Sending out email works slightly different from receiving email. Theorically, you can use any outgoing mail server (or, you can call it SMTP server) to send out your email as long as it allows you to do so. That means you can switch around SMTP servers in your email clients if for some reason the one you are currently using is down.

Few things you need to understand while setting up the SMTP server in your email clients. Most SMTP mail servers require authentication. Examples:

Streamyx SMTP: smtp-proxy.tm.net.my, running on port 25
Streamyx check if you are using their broadband before allowing you to use their SMTP. Therefore, you don’t need to activate any authentication in your email clients.

1.com.my’s SMTP: smtp.emailsrvr.com, running on port 25
You need to login to use. The login info is the same as the one you use to check your email. Therefore you need to select ‘use same setting as Incoming mail server’.

Gmail SMTP: smtp.gmail.com, running on port 465
Gmail SMTP is a secure mail server. Your email client will send your composed email to Gmail SMTP using a secure connection with encryption. Again, Gmail SMTP require authentication too. Enter your Gmail login info in the Authentication settings. You need to indicate that your SMTP is running on secure connection, look for ‘This servers require a secure connection (SSL)’.

By understand how your email client works, you will have no problem to setup your Outlook or Outlook Express quick!

Few things to take note, most of email service provider use your email address as username. Also, if you have change your password (usually done via Webmail), you need to update your password in email clients too.

More tips about using Outlook Express

If you are using Outlook Express and you have lot of email to manage daily, you should really try to enable the Conversion View! It sorts your messages in thread orders. No doubt, this can be sometimes kinda confusing because some new incoming message jump to nowhere hidden in the thread, but when you have used to it, it will become a Must-have!

I was referred to RealMetrics, the leading publisher of unbiased metrics for online service providers. Their Email Hosting report compares the Uptime, Message Delivery Reliability, Message Delivery Latency, and Support Response Time of the top Email Hosting providers.

Apparently, Mailtrust is in their list and stay at the top-most position, showing undoubtly the most reliable performance. We are proud to be their exclusive partner in Malaysia, visit us at www.1.com.my.

Through the TM’s speedometer can give you rough ideas of how fast or the bandwidth of your broadband connection, but I am doubt with how accurate would be the result. As a matter of fact, the speedometer scripts are hosted in servers located in TM’s network. It is considered local and internal peering. If, the scripts are hosted in other data centre in Malaysia such as NTT or Jaring IDC, you may get very different results of what you are expecting!

Yet, another fact is, it is on port 8080, not the standard 80 (http)! This can be misleading!

Each email alias you create simply forwards any message on to any email address that you specify. Most email service providers do not limit number of aliases one can have, but restricted to certain number of email address you can forward to.

It is handy for generic email such as sales@domain.com to forward to another email address. Thus, save you the cost of subscribing additional POP3 account. The only restriction is, you can’t send out email through Email Alias. But, you can override this if you are on Gmail, using the Gmail’s Identity features.