Question:
I tried to send mail from pine and got the error:
Problem detected: “Received abort signal”.
Answer:
We have added a TLS encryption to the mail server and some versions of pine do not work correctly with TLS.
Here is how to fix the problem:
At the main pine menu
press s for setup
c for config
then set the third line (smtp-server) to be:
localhost/novalidate-cert
Save your settings and you should now be able to send mail.
Question:
I was trying to setup Thunderbird. However when it came to specifying the outgoing server, Thunderbird said it would use my existing Earthlink outgoing server instead of yours. I tried to change this but it will not let me.
Answer:
Hi,
It is really not a problem to use earthlink for your outgoing. In fact many ISP’s (including earthlink) require you to use their outgoing SMTP. They firewall out external SMTP (port 25) to control all mail that leaves their network.
As long as your incoming POP3 is set to your domain with us it will work fine.
Question:
Starting last week we have been receiving e-mails (maybe 5-10 a day) that the subject is “Form Submission”. However the email is blank. There is no From or other information in the email.
Where are these e-mails coming from? Are these generated from our website or somewhere else? Any guidance you can provide would be helpful.
Answer:
Hi,
I checked your site and it looks like you are using the popular formmail.pl script.
Usually these type of emails are generated by badly wrote web-robots (search engine indexers, etc.) that are indexing your site and submitting the blank forms.
Another likely possiblilty is that they are spam-bot attempts to use your form to send out spam. I checked out your script and it is the latest version so you should be safe. Older versions of formmail.pl had a bug that allowed spam sending so there are all kinds of spam-bots out searching for exploitable formmail.pl scripts to exploit.
Again if you are using version 1.92 or above you should be safe. If you are using anything older, you need to upgrade ASAP!
Question:
I would like to create a web page with the archived messages on our website. Is there another way to access the mailing list messages at phpwebhosting in order to set up a dynamically generated mail archive page?
Answer:
Currently there is no automatic way to create a web archive of messages for your mailing list.
However you can try installing Dada Mail from :
http://mojo.skazat.com/
and use that as your Mailing list software. It has a nice built-in web interface. We have a lot of clients who use it and like it.
I hope this helps!
Question:
Are you familiar with hypermail? It is an archiving program. It takes email and puts it in a convenient html archive. What hypermail purportedly does is take mail from mbox and put it in the archive. It can’t be too complicated or difficult to configure and install. Do you know anything about it? Would it work on your servers?
Answer :
I am not very familiar with hypermail, but from what you describe the biggest problem would be that our mail server software (qmail – qmail.org) puts the messages in maildirs.
Another problem is that the maildirs are only accessible by the special user vpopmail. You can forward select addresses to your Linux shell mail account (your_username@your_server.phpwebhosting.com) and have direct access to the maildirs there to convert them to mbox format. However this becomes complicated and we are unable to provide technical support for it.
I would say the bottom line would be that if you enjoy messing with things a bit, you would be able to make it work. If you want it to just work right away, I would advise against it.
Underneath the control panel we attempt to provide as pure of a Linux shell account experience as we can. If you like developing in that environment then you can probably make what you want to work happen. However you would be on your own. We only are able to provide official support for the email configuration in the control panel (having said that, I personally send all my mail to the shell and read/manage my mail in a mbox-format with a shell mail reader – so it is possible).
I hope this has helped.
To send/receive mail from your domain, you can either set-up a local mail program (running on your computer) or use one of our webmail programs at post.phpwebhosting.com.
The most popular local mail programs are either Outlook (for Windows) or Mail (for a Mac). Most computers come with one or the other pre-installed. Here is a quick tutorial for setting up Outlook –
http://www.phpwebhosting.com/help/nick/Outlook_Set_Up.htm
If you don’t have experience using a local mail program like Outlook, I would suggest starting with one of our webmail programs. They work similar to Yahoo or Hotmail where you simply connect to them via the internet.
To use of of our webmail programs, just go to post.phpwebhosting.com and select which mail program you would like to use (UebiMiau or Nural Storm). Once you select the program, you must enter the name of the mailbox you are trying to access, the password assigned to that mail account, and your domain name. You will then get a web interface with options for sending and receiving mail.
Please see one of our other tutorials for detailed information on using our mail system.
Make sure you are logging in as postmaster. Postmaster is the only mail user that can create new forwards/POP3’s. If you are logged in as any user other than postmaster, you will only be able to perform maintenance on that account (change passwords, etc.).
These messages are most likely coming from an infected computer/server that you have had contact with. These messages are not coming from your server and your domain name is only being forged in the ‘from’ field of these messages. Unfortunately, there is not alot that can be done to stop this. About the only thing you can do is change your mail catch-all to ‘bounce’ which will stop the mail being addressed to bogus (undefined) addresses at your domain.
Question:
I can suddenly no longer send mail – my website works and I can receive mail but I cannot send any mail. What is wrong?
Answer:
What is most likely happening is that your local ISP is no longer allowing you to send email out using any mail server except their own. This is a common practice that many ISP’s do now in order to attempt to better control their networks.
What you will need to do to get around this is either:
1.) set your outgoing / SMTP mail server to your ISP’s mail server. You may need to call your ISP to find out exactly what they use. Usually it is something like :
mail.your_isp.com
or
smtp.your_isp.com
If these do not work, you’ll need to contact them to find out what they use.
Make sure you DO NOT change your incoming / pop3 mail server name. It must stay the same so that you can still get mail from us.
2.) The other option is to keep you mail settings the same but change the SMTP port from 25 (the default) to 2525 . We run mail on ports 25 and 2525 so that clients whose ISP’s no longer allow outgoing mail can still send mail. In most cases, the ISP is only blocking mail the port 25 so if you set your mail program to use port 2525 you will be able to send again.
Question :
For some reason today I’m getting a lot of spam generated to random email addresses to and from my domain. I assume this is a virus scam or other net trick.
My catch-all is directing all these random address to my main account.
How do you elimate the catch all address or is there another solution?
Thanks
Answer:
Hi,
Unfortunatly this is becoming more and more common. I would recommend you delete the catch-all address. Catch-all’s used to be a very useful type of email address but now that spammers and virus writers are starting to bombard lots of random addresses at domains we are recommending people stop using catch-alls.
You can delete your catch-all by doing the following :
1. Go into your email control panel
2. Click on “Edit existing POP3 accounts”
3. Click on “Set catchall email deleted” near the bottom of that page.