ProZ.com provides comprehensive web hosting services to full platinum members. See the hosting info page for more information.

This document describes how to use the email features provided by ProZ.com hosting.

Your mail login and password

Your main email account is created by default when you sign up for a hosting account. By default, mail sent to any address @yourdomain.com is delivered to this account. To access your main email account, use the login name and password of your hosting account. Your login username is shown on your hosting info page. If you forget your password, see this FAQ about how to reset a hosting password.

To access additional email accounts, the login name is composed of the email address, with a '+' substituted for the '@'.

For example, the login name for the account "[email protected]" is "user+example.com". If your e-mail client has trouble using a + sign in the login, you can use the @, :, or % sign instead.

See below for more information about using additional email accounts.


Configuring your email client

Auto-configuring your email client

Depending on the email client you use, it may be possible to automatically configure it for use with your email account. To do so:

• Log in to your hosting control panel, by clicking "[control panel]" on your hosting info page.
• In your control panel, under "Mail", select "Email accounts".
• In the row for your desired email account, click the "More" dropdown list, and select "Configure email client".
• If your email program is listed in the "Auto-configure" list, click the link to attempt to configure it automatically.
• If auto-configuration is not possible, use the settings at the bottom of the page to manually configure your email program.

Incoming/outgoing mail server

To access your email from an email program such as Eudora or Outlook, you must configure it to use the correct mail server for your hosting account.

You can enter a single mail server name when asked for your "Incoming" (POP3 or IMAP) and "Outgoing" (SMTP) mail servers.

Your mail server is: mail.yourdomain.com

Substitute your own domain name for yourdomain.com. Your actual mail server name is shown on your hosting info page.

SMTP Authentication

In order to send email using your hosting account, make sure to enable SMTP Authentication. To do so in Outlook XP, click "Advanced" in the configuration dialog, and on the "Outgoing server" tab check the box "My server (SMTP) requires authentication". Then choose "Use the same settings as the incoming server" (which is checked by default). [Thanks to Jerzy Czopik for this addition.]

If you still can't send email even after enabling SMTP authentication, your ISP may be interfering. Some ISPs will not allow you to relay to another SMTP server to send mail. If this is the policy of your ISP, you must use your ISP's SMTP server to send mail. Contact your internet provider to obtain the proper SMTP server settings (at a minimum you will have to un-check "use the same settings as the incoming server" in your SMTP authentication settings).


Using web mail

ProZ.com hosting offers the choice of three different web-based email programs: NeoMail, Horde, and SquirrelMail. See the section on web mail in the cPanel manual for a summary of each of these programs.

Access the webmail interface for your main email account by clicking the webmail link on your hosting info page; by clicking the "webmail" icon on your control panel home page; or by visiting this link: http://yourdomain.com/webmail

Access the webmail interface for additional email accounts from the "Add/Remove Accounts" page, as discussed below.


The default address - what to do with unrouted mail

Any email that is sent to an unknown account at your domain name will be automatically rerouted to your default email account. This can be useful because it allows you to give out lots of email addresses, such as [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], without having to worry about setting up individual email accounts or forwarders for them. Unfortunately, you may also receive considerably more spam by accepting all unrouted email.

To change the default account to which unrouted email is delivered, log in to your control panel and go to Mail -> Default Address. This will show the default address for each domain in your hosting account.

Click on the Set Default Address link. Enter the complete email address for the new default in the field next to your web site name drop-down list. Warning: If you enter an invalid email address in this field, all your unrouted email will not be delivered and will bounce back to the sender.

To throw away all unrouted incoming mail, enter: :blackhole:

(Note the colons (:) on both sides of :blackhole:.)

To bounce unrouted email back to the sender, you can enter: :fail: no such address here

Click on the Change button to save your new default address.

If you choose not to accept all unrouted mail but still wish to have multiple email addresses delivered to the same account (info@, support@, joe@, etc.), add forwarders for these email addresses as discussed below.

Note that refusing unrouted email (using :fail: or :blackhole:) effectively disables your main email account. If you choose to do this, you must set up an additional email account as described below.


Adding and maintaining email accounts

To manage your email accounts, log in to your control panel. Then go to Mail -> Add/Remove Accounts.

This page lists your email accounts, and provides links for each to read webmail, to change passwords, or to delete the account.

Click "Show Disk Space Used" to see how much disk space has been used by each email account. Click "Change Quota" to change the maximum allowed disk usage for each account.

Additional email account have their own login usernames and passwords. If all you want is to add another email address to be delivered to your main email account, set up a forwarder for that email address as discussed in the forwarders section.

To add a new email account, click on the "Add Account" link.

Enter the first part of the email address and the password for the account in the "E-mail" and "Password" fields.

Enter the maximum size limit of this mailbox in the "Quota" field, if required. The size limit is in megabytes. Not entering a number means that the mailbox size is only limited by the available disk space.

Click on the "Create" button to save your new account.


Filtering and spam fighting

You can create filters to forward or discard email with certain characteristics, by matching patterns in the headers and message body. For example, you could forward all ProZ.com job notifications to one email address, and KudoZ notifications to another. See the section on email filtering in the cPanel manual for more information.

One of the first things to do if you want to reduce spam is to stop accepting unrouted email, as discussed in the "default address" section above.

To really get tough on spam, you can activate the optional SpamAssassin spam filter. SpamAssassin is an email filter with many preset rules to identify spam and mark it for rerouting or deletion. See the section on SpamAssassin in the cPanel manual for more information.

Forwarders and auto-responders

Forwarders allow you to automatically forward email sent to a given email address to another account. It allows you to create email aliases, such as info@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com, etc., and have them all delivered to one account. To add a new forwarder, log in to your control panel and go to Mail -> Forwarders -> Add Forwarder. Enter the email address you want forwarded on the left-hand side. On the right, enter the complete email address to which email should be forwarded.

See the section on forwarders in the cPanel manual for more information.

Autoresponders allow you to send an automatic reply when an email arrives for a specific email account. Autoresponders are commonly used for "Out of Office" style messages to inform your correspondents that you are not available. For details about configuring autoresponders, see the section on autoresponders in the cPanel manual.


Further resources

The mail section of the cPanel manual has step-by-step instructions for using all of the cPanel mail features.

The Hosting FAQ, Getting Started Guide, and hosting info page provide more information about the hosting service.

If you still have questions, please submit a support request.