Email Hosting and 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.
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 several ports in case your ISP blocks the standard port. 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 an additional charge of £2.50 +VAT per mailbox per month for hosting email on our servers.
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.
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 1,000,000 spam and malware emails a week (about 97% of all incoming messages). Our anti-virus software is updated daily overnight and includes common phishing emails in addition to viruses. Spam filtering is a two stage process involving an initial check for the sender's IP address in a real-time blacklist and a later scan of the message text using content-matching rules. 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.
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 reduce the number of fake bounce messages you receive.
