Email Hosting and Redirection
Email redirection
We generally provide email redirection for any number of usernames at the domain names registered for your website free of charge. This requires that you set up an email account with another provider, such as your ISP, or an online service such as Google Mail. Email sent to your website's domain name can then be forwarded to this email account.
Email hosting
Alternatively you can choose to host your email on our servers using IMAP or POP for access from your favourite email reader application. We offer secure access over TLS as standard. With this service you can send email from your domain name using our secure SMTP server which runs on ports 25 and 587 in case your ISP blocks the standard port 25. In addition we provide a web-based alternative interface to your email. If you have a PDA or smartphone we provide push email using IMAP IDLE.
There is a charge of £2.10 +VAT per mailbox per month for hosting email on our servers, including 512MB of email storage. Each further 512MB incurs an additional charge of £1 +VAT per month.
In both cases we provide relay servers both on- and off-site so that you do not lose email sent while our main mail server is offline.
Filtering and spam prevention
We filter all incoming email for spam and viruses, whether the final recipient is a local mailbox or the mail will be redirected to another provider. As a result we currently reject around 1,650,000 spam and malware emails a week (about 98% of all incoming messages). Because all our mail is received through the same servers, and the filtering is server-wide, you cannot completely opt out of our spam and virus filtering service. Filtering is a multi-stage process:
- We try to validate the sending mailserver's IP address against its stated hostname. If they do not match, we tell the mailserver to try again later. Most spam senders will never reconnect, but all legitimate servers should retry sending the message at intervals for at least four days. This technique is known as greylisting. This technique keeps roughly 450,000 junk mails a week out of our clients' inboxes.
- We maintain a (short) blacklist of email and IP addresses known to send spam and reject all incoming email from these addresses.
- If the sending domain has published an SPF record, we reject any mail from hosts forbidden to send on behalf of the domain. We reject around 200,000 emails a week based on this check.
- We scan all messages for viruses before accepting them. Our anti-virus software is updated daily overnight and includes common phishing emails in addition to viruses. About 40,000 viruses are trapped a week.
- Finally we scan the message text for spam using content-matching rules which are also updated daily, rejecting a further 300,000 spam messages a week as a result.
If we provide your domain name, we add an SPF record to your domain as standard. This record publishes information about which mail servers are permitted to send mail from your domain, and reduces spam sent by other servers claiming to be from your email address. If you want to send mail from your domain without using our servers (for example, from a mail server in your office), you should let us know so we can update the record. If we redirect email for you, we use SRS to ensure your legitimate email is not rejected by your ISP.
How to configure your email
If we provide your email you can read it online using the supplied username and password at our webmail application.
We also provide online step-by-step guides for configuring some popular desktop email clients below:
