Understanding Email

What is email? What is a POP3 mailbox? What are Email Aliases?	What is SMTP? How do I protect my mailbox from Spam?
Video Tutorials How to set up Outlook Express (or Windows Mail in Vista)

	What is email? Email refers to electronic mail, which is a convenient means of sending messages via the internet. Email can also allow you to send files as attachments such as photographs and other files to email messages.
	Note: Most email servers, including ours prohibit sending attachments that are deemed to be 'dangerous' to the recipent's computer, so Windows executable files like .exe, .pif, .com, .reg etc will be automatically stripped from the email by the mail server before it gets delivered to the receiver. If you want to send executable files, then you must first bundle them into a zip file and then attach the zip file to the email.
	From a security standpoint, if you receive an email from an unknown source that has a zip attachment, then you should think twice before opening it because it may contain a malicious executable that will almost certainly try to infect your computer with a trojan or virus. Don't automatically rely on your anti-virus application to report that it contains malicious code - Some AV applications don't or can't inspect the content of a zip file.

What is a POP3 mailbox? POP3 stands for 'Post Office Protocol 3'  POP3 mailboxes reside on a POP3 server running specialised email software. The email in these mailboxes can be collected and downloaded to your PC by using a mail client (or mail program). Mail clients include Microsoft's Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail in VISTA. The mail client uses POP3 to copy the mail from your POP3 mailbox to your PC. Once the mail has been downloaded you do not need to be connected to the internet while it is being read as the mail client will store the downloaded mail in it's Inbox on your PC.

Note: We regularly have users asking why they are not able to send email using POP3 The answer in short is... A POP3 mailbox stores email, but cannot send it - Email is sent using the SMTP Protocol which is a distinctly different mechanism.

	What are Email Aliases? Email Aliasing is a convenient method of creating multiple email addresses for a single POP3 mailbox without having to create a full POP3 mailbox for additional names. For instance... If your primary email address is yourname@yourdomain.com you might also want to accept email as yourfullname@yourdomain.com or info@yourdomain.com etc
	By adding the alias names of yourfullname, and info as alias names to the primary mailbox, the mailbox will accept email for those additional names, and when you download your email, you will download mail addressed to info@yourdomain.com & yourfullname@yourdomain.com at the same time.
	Use email aliases to reduce spam - Create a 'throwaway' email alias like nospam@yourdomain.com and use that when signing up on an unknown website or giving away your email address online. Most websites honour your privacy but some may distribute your email address to spam vendors, you never know who will do what when you first sign up, so err on the 'safe' side'. If you do start getting a lot of junk addressed to nospam@yourdomain.com then you can delete that alias, and create another one.. Stopping spam dead in it's tracks! Some of our customers deliberately create an email alias that relates to the website they are giving the email address to, example.. uktrading@yourdomain.com - If you started to get spammed on that address, then you know who the culprit was that leaked, gave away (or sold) that email address to the spammers. We don't give away or sell email addresses by the way! We take your privacy very seriously, and any data that we store is kept securely, and is only used to manage your account with us, and is never ever shared with anyone else.