Email Hints

One of the first things you want to do with your domain is set up email. If you’ve set up email clients before, the procedure is similar, although there is one difference that may cause you trouble. With a regular ISP (Internet Service Provider), you get a username from that ISP. So if your username is Igor, and the ISP is xyzisp.com, your email address is Igor@xyzisp.com, and you'll enter the following in your email client:

Email Address: Igor@xyzisp.com
POP (or IMAP) server (Incoming mail): mail.xyzisp.com (ie, the computer that receives your mail, information supplied by the ISP)
SMTP server (Outgoing mail): smtp.xyzisp.com (ie, the computer at your ISP that sends out your mail, information supplied by the ISP)
Username: Igor
Password: ********

(These are the bare minimum entries. There may be other things to enter, depending on whether or not your ISP requires authentication for sending mail, etc.)

When someone hosts your domain, you still need their computers to take care of your email. An entity called a “Nameserver” takes care of translating your domain name into one that their computers know how to handle, but you have to help. So now we have you, Igor, and your spanking new domain, mycrib.com. You want your email address to be “Igor@mycrib.com.” The hosting company has told you that your POP (or IMAP) server is “mail.mycrib.com,” and your SMTP server is also “mail.mycrib.com.” You’re in a hurry to start getting mail, so you follow the above example and enter “mail.mycrib.com” for the POP and SMTP servers, and “Igor” for your Username, and ******** for your Password. Then you check your mail, and you wait, and you wait, and finally you get an error message back, and the login box asking for your password again, but no email.
Frustrating, isn’t it!

This is what you should have entered:

Email Address: Igor@mycrib.com
POP server: mail.mycrib.com
SMTP server: mail.mycrib.com
Username: Igor@mycrib.com
Password: ********

(What’s happening here is without the “@mycrib.com” the username “Igor” hits the real mail computer (“mail.yourhost.com” which is what the nameserver record translates “mail.mycrib.com” into) on its email port. “mail.yourhost.com” says, “What’s Igor doing trying to log in on my email port? And who *is* Igor, anyway? I don’t THINK so! Goodbye…”)

Note: If you can use your current ISP for outgoing (SMTP) mail, it’ll likely be faster than using your domain host. Most ISP’s require some kind of authentication to send mail; you either have to check your email there before sending (which gives you up to a half-hour window to send mail) or you have to supply a username and password to their SMTP server. Check with your ISP.

I've successfully set up, and used the following clients to both send and receive mail from a mailbox in my domain at digipark.com, and have documented the procedures: Eudora, Netscape, Opera, The Bat!, Mulberry and PocoMail. Digipark has good setup instructions for Outlook Express.

I also had some problems with The Bat!; it didn't work quite like I expected. After I'd done the "wizard" part of the setup, I checked the mail, and there was some, so I sent a test message and it went out. "Wait a minute," I said to myself, "I didn't set up authentication for sending mail!" So I checked, sure enough, no authentication selected; I tried another message and it went out, too. So I turned authentication on, put in a username/password, etc, and tried to send another message. It didn't go, kicked back an error message. (The documentation for The Bat! claims it tries to do MD5 authentication, and if that fails, falls back to plain text. Perhaps when the server sees the MD5 stuff, it just ignores everthing else. Dunno...)

Questions?
fulton@exwis.com