How To Use Webmail

Logging in to Webmail

To log in to webmail, use the URL http://mail.yourdomain.com/
If you wish to use a secure version of webmail, you can use https://mail.yourdomain.com/
However, please note that secure access is slightly slower than non-secure access. Also, you may get a browser warning regarding domain mismatch in the secure certificate. That is because we issued the certificate using the IP of the server rather than domain name since webmail can be accesssed by various domain names such as mail.thisdomain and mail.thatdomain.

Use the following settings:

Domain Name - yourdomain.com

User ID - [the section before '@' in your main email address]

In the above example, the actual email address is mary@yourdomain.com but this address is split between the two top fields. If you only have the default postmaster Email Account set up, you should use 'postmaster'.

Password - [chosen by you]

You will be asked to choose a password when your Email Account is first created. This can be up to 16 characters long, using any keyboard symbol. Both users and postmaster can change passwords at any time via their web log-in. We recommends that your password is as cryptic as possible and is changed regularly.

Webmail main menu

The following options are available from any screen:

• Check for new mail
• Create new message
• Folder management
• Account preferences - email signature, mailing lists, password
• Mail Filters
• Address book
• Log out

Check for new mail

Click on the Check Mail option from the left-hand menu. The screen will refresh and if you are in any screen other than the main menu, you will be returned to the main menu. If any mail has arrived, the 'number of unread messages' figure will have increased. Click on Inbox to read your mail. Unread mail has an 'N' next to it in the list. Click on any part of the email information to read the message.

Send messages

To send an email, click on the Create Message option from the left-hand menu. The Create Message page has the following options:

• From - shows the sender's address. The default settings are taken from the details in your Email Account administration screen but can be edited. If you are logging into Webmail as postmaster, use this field to change to a more appropriate profile.
• Address book - lists the Nicknames in your address book. To send mail to one of more of them, highlight the name(s) and click on the To:, Cc: or Bcc: buttons as required.
• To - the email address to which the message is being sent.
• Cc - copy the message to addresses in this field.
• Bcc - blind-copy the message to addresses in this field, i.e. other recipients of this email do not know that this address has received a copy.
• Reply-To - send replies to this message to an address other than that in the From field.
• Subject - the message title.
• Message - the body of the email.
• Send - send the message.
• Save Draft - save a copy of the message in the Drafts folder.
• x Attachments - attach a file from your computer. X represents the number of attachments. Clicking the button opens a new screen with the following options:
• Browse / Upload - Browse opens a Windows file in which you should search for the file to be uploaded. Highlight the file name, click on Open and then on Upload. You can only upload one file at a time so repeat as many times as required. Files names to be attached are displayed at the top of the screen.
• Delete Selected - remove a file from your Uploaded list before you send the mail. First you should select the tick box of the file(s) to be deleted.
• Preview - return to the main Create Message screen.
• Send - send the file with all current attachments.
• Save Draft - save a copy of the message in the Drafts folder.

Email management

Emails within a folder are listed in date order, with the newest first. Unread mail has an 'N' next to it. Click on any part of the email information to read the message.

Messages downloaded to an email client program are deleted from the mail server at the end of the download and will be removed from the Webmail Inbox. If you wish to store any messages in the Webmail system you should transfer them to a new folder. However, if they are not in the Inbox, your email client program will not detect them and you will not have a copy on your computer.

If a message has an attached file, you can view it online (if it is a format viewable in a web browser) by clicking on Display Attachment. To download the file to your computer, click on Download Attachment. WARNING: you should never open ANY email attachment, whether it is unsolicited or from a known source, unless you have checked that it is virus-free.

To move an email from one folder to another, click in the tick box next to it, select the destination folder from the Move To drop-down list, then press Go. To move all emails within a folder, click the Select All Shown box instead of the individual tick boxes.

To delete an individual email, click in the tick box next to it and press Delete. To delete all mails in a folder, click the Select All Shown box and press Delete.

Mail icons

At the top and bottom of each message are the following icons:

	View the next message in the list.
	View the previous message in the list.
	Delete the current message.
	View the contents of the current folder.<,p>
	Reply to the current message.
	Reply to all senders.
	Reply to a mailing list.
	Forward the current message.
	Forward the email as an attachment. The entire message and any attachments will be bundled together and you can then add your own comments to the recipient.
	View the headers of the email.
	View the message in a printer-friendly format.

Folder management

The Main Menu / folder list can be opened at any time by clicking on the Folders link in the left-hand menu. Click on a folder name to open it.

Create new folders

Type the desired name in the Create New Folder field on the Main Menu. You can create it as a sub-directory of an existing folder by typing the existing folder name in the lower field. Press Create. The screen will refresh to show the new folder list. Sub-folders shown in the Main Menu do not have an option button next to them for management functions. To use the features below, click on the sub-folder name to open a separate management screen.

Rename folders

Select the folder name from the Rename To: drop-down list, type the new name in the empty field to its right and press Rename Folder. The screen will refresh to show the revised folder list. You cannot rename the Inbox, Drafts, Sent and Trash folders. You cannot rename any folders for which mail filters have been set up - to do so, first amend or delete all relevant filters.

Delete folders / folder contents

To delete all messages in a folder without removing the folder itself, select the folder name and the Delete Folder Contents option then press Delete. If a folder is empty, you can delete it entirely. Select the name and the Delete Folder option, then press Delete. You cannot delete a folder which contains mail, nor the Inbox, Drafts, Sent and Trash folders. You cannot delete any folders for which mail filters have been set up - to do so, first amend or delete all relevant filters.

Address Book

Click on Address Book on the main left-hand menu to access the various options.

Create Address Book entry

Enter a name in the New Nickname field and press Create. In the new screen that appears, enter the real name and email address for the entry and press Add. A Nickname can have multiple email addresses associated with it, therefore this feature allows you to create a mailing list for outgoing email. To do this, keep entering real names and addresses and pressing Add. The address list for entry is shown above these fields.

Edit Address Book entry

Select the Nickname from the Choose drop-down list and press Edit. A new screen will open showing all email addresses under that Nickname. Click on the Edit button of the real name and address to be changed. Those details will appear in the two lower fields. Make your changes and click the Edit button next to those fields. The screen will refresh and the address list will show the new details. It is not possible to edit the Nicknames themselves.

Delete Address Book entry

To delete an address from a Nickname's list, select the Nickname from the Choose drop-down list and press Edit to display the list of associated addresses, then press the Delete button next to the relevant name. To delete a Nickname, select it from the Choose drop-down list and press Delete.

Global Address Book Search

Click on this link to search global LDAP address books, including Bigfoot, Infospace, Netscape Netcenter, and WhoWhere. You can also add custom LDAP address books.

Account preferences

The Preferences option on the main menu contains a number of general mail settings, which can be amended at any time. If you make any changes other than to the password, press Update Preferences to activate them.

• Display full message headers - automatically show the headers (technical information) for any message, which would otherwise only appear if the Show Headers icon was pressed. This can be useful if you are trying to track a spammer. The default setting is 'off'.
   
• Display HTML E-Mail - show full features of HTML-formatted emails. If this option is not selected, formatting will not work - embedded pictures will not be displayed and formatted text will just show as plain text. The default setting is 'on'.
   
• Do not display flowed text formatted mail - messages can contain specific hard-coded line-breaks, or they can allow that information to be determined as you view the message. If this option is chosen, some forwarded messages may not appear correctly. The default setting is 'off'.
   
• Do not archive sent messages in the Sent folder - by default, mail that you send is automatically stored in the Sent folder. Selecting the 'do not archive' option means that no record of your sent mail is kept.
   
• Messages in the Trash will be deleted after [x] days - Webmail will delete files in your Trash folder after a certain number of days. The maximum period is 7 days and the minimum is 1.
   
• Sort messages by - messages in your folders can be sorted by date or alphabetically by Sender or Subject. Choose an option from the drop-down list. The default setting is 'date'.
   
• Messages per page - show a specified number of messages on each folder page. The default is 10 but this can be increased to 20, 50, 100 or 250.
   
• Show oldest messages first - if your emails are sorted by date, by default the newest appears at the top. Selecting this option reverses the order.
   
• Your signature - anything typed in this field will be automatically attached to the bottom of your outgoing mails. This signature can, for example, be your contact details, to save having to retype it on each message.
   
• Mailing Lists - Enter the addresses of mailing lists you are subscribed to (one per line).
   
• Change Mail Password - type in your current password, then enter the new password twice. Passwords can be up to 16 characters long and can contain any keyboard symbol.
   

Mail Filters

You can use the filter function to accomplish various tasks such as directing e-mails that match certain criteria to appropriate individuals or reject unwanted spam e-mails from ever reaching you.

To setup a mail filter, follow these steps:

Under the Existing mail filters section, select [Add] to add a new filter. Fill in the required information and select the options applicable to your needs.  These are explained as follows:

Rule Name

• Type in the name of your filter.  You can call it whatever you wish.
  If you wish to use regular expression to match text in the incoming e-mail, check the box labeled using regular expression rather than plain text.  Note: Our mail filters rely on the maildropfilter software which operates using either plain text or Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library. So you can refer to the syntax in this document http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html to compose your rules if you wishes to use regular expression. Please also note that filter rules are case insensitive. That is "abc" is the same as "ABC".

Condition

• Header: Select this radio button if you wish to scan the header of an incoming e-mail. Use the drop down box to select a specific header field such as Subject, From, To, etc, you want the filter rule to apply to. More specifically, you can tell the rule to match from the beginning, middle, or end of the header field. Then in the next field to the right, specify your plain text or regular expression word you wish to match against the header. Note: be careful when you filter e-mail with attachments. Attachments are encoded into ASCII representations, which may contain word patterns that may match the ones you are using as filtering criteria. However, these word patterns are normally not by themselves. Example, DIV+rzOecGcISeX0Jemd3iag972wlhgo&las. If you had used the word "sex" as your criteria, you would have caught this e-mail which may not be what you intended. You could avoid this problem by flanking the word "sex" with spaces using regular expression. Example, \s+sex\s+ where \s represents a white space and + represents one of more of the previous character . So \s+ represents one or more spaces.
• Body: If you wish to use body instead of header, check this radio button. The rest of the rules are the same as that described in the header section above.
• Addressed to or Not addressed to: This is basically a short cut to use instead of going through the header and selecting a To field. If you do not understand how e-mail headers work, select this option instead and enter the e-mail address you wish to match against the incoming e-mail
• Is a plain text message:  Select this option if you wish to match against plain text e-mail
• Is not a plain text message: Select this option if you wish to match against HTML formatted e-mail or e-mail with attachments
• Is a multipart MIME message: Select this option if you wish to match against e-mail that contains complex message structure with more than one part, each of which has headers of its own. Examples of such e-mail are those with different languages, HTML, attachments, PGP signed e-mail or a digest of different e-mail etc.
• Is not a multipart MIME message: Select this option if you wish to match against e-mail that are MIME encoded but not multipart.
• Message is larger than or smaller than a certain number of bytes: Select this if you wish to filter against e-mail based entirely on the size of the e-mail. This is useful if you do not expect to receive any large e-mail.

Action

This section assumes that the filter rules have successfully matched an incoming e-mail so the action will be taken on this e-mail.

• Save in: If you wish to move the e-mail to a certain folder on the server, select this option and choose from the drop down box the desired folder. If you wish to save it to a specific folder that is not there, you will need to create it via webmail. Note that if you save it in the Trash, it will be deleted after 7 days if not earlier depending on your specification in webmail. If you want the e-mail to be subjected to further filtering, check the box labeled and continue filtering.
• Forward to: If instead of saving the e-mail that has matched your criteria, you wish to forward that e-mail to another address, select this option and enter the appropriate e-mail to forward to. If you want the e-mail to be subjected to further filtering, check the box labeled and continue filtering.
• Reject with error: *We advised against choosing this option because a lot of spam e-mails do not have a return address or invalid return addresses. So rejecting them may waste server resources and or sending e-mail to innocent recipients especially if spammers falsify return addresses. However, if you wish to go against our advice, select this option and type in the error message here. Something like Invalid Recipient etc may deter future spams.

Click [Submit] to save your changes to the rule. Then click on [Save all Changes] at the top to actually activate all the rules you have saved.