DSI offers email accounts with our website hosting service. We have tried to make the settings fairly straight forward and typical.
An email account username is the full email address: email@yourdomain.tld
The password, of course is whatever you have it set as. Athough, we must stress the importance of security. A good password should be alpha numeric with case differences and nonstandard characters at least 7 characters in length.
Our website hosting allows four ways in which to process mail; website Based (webmail), IMAP, POP3 and SMTP (outgoing). This can be done securely (TLS, SSL) or insecurely.
You can access your email anywhere on the planet and beyond providing you have an active internet connection. A quick and simple way to do this is to use the webmail feature.
To access webmail point your web browser to YOURDOMAIN.TLD/webmail where ‘YOURDOMAIN.TLD’ = the domain or subdomain we are hosting for you.
You can access your email securely using HTTPS (SSL), https://YOURDOMAIN.TLD/webmail. If you don’t have secured hosting (SSL Certificate) with us you will get a notification that the connection is not from a trusted source. This is a standard security feature of most browsers to protect against bogus or malicious websites. Your connection will be secure and legitimate; this warning is caused by a self-signed server certificate. If you do have secured hosting with us you won’t see the trusted source notification. Please keep in mind our SSL certificates are domain specific and do NOT cross subdomains. E.g. if you have an issued certificate for example.com the certificate does not validate webmail.example.dom. A separate certificate would be required.
Internet Message Access Protocol is the recommended way to access and use your email account hosted by DSI with an email client. An email client is software created for the purpose of manage email messages. Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail (Mac), Eudora, Windows Live Mail are examples of an email client.
IMAP allows two way synchronization of your email account. Emails are managed across all your email enabled devices simultaneously. An email you read on your phone can also be read on your tablet or PC. Deleting an email while using your PC will also disappear from your phone.
IMAP Ports
993 – Secure (SSL/TLS)
143 – Insecure (No SSL)
Post Office Protocol version 3 in the past was a very common protocol used to access email. It is still commonly used however; IMAP is strongly encouraged as information sharing increasing its mobility and device spanning.
The biggest issue with POP3 is that most email clients by default download your email and store it locally. The emails are removed from the server and thus not available anywhere other than the device they were downloaded to. Some email clients allow emails to be retained on the server, but that setting should be enabled in the email client during the configuration of the account.
POP3 Ports
995 – Secure (SSL/TLS)
110 – Insecure (No SSL)
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is used sending email. It is the ‘Outgoing’ portion of the email client configuration. This protocol is probably the most misunderstood and most abused. The acronym could be understood as spam must take place.
Simply put, SMTP is utilized to get the sent mail to the MTA (message transfer agent) software for processing. Security of an MTA/SMTP is somewhat of an ongoing art.
SMTP Ports
465 – Secure (SSL)
25 – Insecure (No SSL) * username/password authentication MUST be enabled.
587 – Insecure (No SSL) Use if your ISP blocks port 25.
The elements for configuring access to your email account are:
In your email client click ‘add account’ and select type IMAP or POP3. Enter the settings as requested by the email client and as understood from above.
Finish the setup by testing both incoming and outgoing functions.
If you need assistance setting up your email client or accessing your email please contact us and we will be happy to help.
