Email Help

Click on a link below that best describes your need or problem.

HOW TO

• Instructions for setting up Outlook, iPhone, Mac mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc..

• Manage, create, delete email accounts, set up forwards, autoresponders, aliases, etc.

• Get the best free tools including: anti-virus's, email clients, firewalls, spyware protection, etc...

• How to check email using our webmail interface (check it online).

• How do I reduce the amount of SPAM I receive ?

• How do I ensure I have a strong password ?

• Can you setup/delete an email account for me, or change my email password ?

PROBLEM

• How do I reduce the amount of SPAM I receive ?

• "Why am I suddenly getting lots of bounced emails to email addresses that do not exist at my domain — to my catchall address ?"

• "I am unable to send email using Outlook/Eudora/or other email client."

• "When trying to send email using Outlook/Eudora/or other email client, it takes a long time (more than a minute) before the mail actually sends."

• Error message: "Please enter network password"

• Email bounces back; or , getting an error message similar to '553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1).

• Error message ending with any of the following error codes: 0x800ccc0F , 0x800ccc0F , 0x800ccc19

• Error message ending with the error code: 0x800CCC0E

• Error messages ending with the error codes: 0x800CCC7D

• Our spamming policy / What to do if infected with a mass emailing virus

HOW TO:

Manage, create, delete email accounts, set up forwards, autoresponders, aliases, and in general, ADMINISTER email accounts.

ANSWER

NOTE: Please do not confuse checking your email with administering (managing/creating/deleting) email accounts. To check/send email please see this other article.

To login to the webadmin (control panel):

1. Click the "Login" link in the upper-right corner of this site
2. and then click the "WebAdmin" link (here is a shortcut http://webadmin.mytechsupport.com)
3. If you have forgotten your password, just use the "I forgot my password" link there.

To create or delete an email account:

1. Once you are logged in, click the Email link on the top.
2. If you have more than one domain with us, you will first need to select which domain you want to edit and add email accounts to.
3. Then, click the Add a new email account link at the top center of the page and add the email account—that's all !
4. to remove an email account, just select the email from the drop-down box, and click the delete button

Changing a password on an email account is just as easy:

1. Select the email account
2. Click the Delete Email button

Aliases, Forwards, Groups

1. ALIAS: An alias is not a real email account. It is just an address that gets pointed to a real email address.
1. For example, I could create an alias service@mysite.com which would point to 3 of my employees real email accounts.
2. FORWARD: These server the same purpose really. The difference is, these are real email account. We advise not using the "save a copy" option unless you are checking and deleting/downloading email from that actual account (to avoid accidently going over your email quota).
1. Using a forward, I could basically do the same thing as the previous example. Or perhaps a better reason to use forwards is when I have an employee that I want to get a copy of all of their emails. This is one way to do that. It's also useful if an employee left your company and you need to forward his account to whoever took his/her place. An alias would also work in this case as well
3. GROUPS: This is the same as aliases, but works better with lots of emails because you can assign several emails at once, to the group (it will make more sense if you jsut try it out).
1. For example, I could setup an email address like everyone@mycompany.com, which I could then add all my employees emails to very qucikly, for sending out company emails.

HOW TO:

How to check email using our webmail interface (online).

ANSWER

NOTE: Please do not confuse checking your email with administering (managing/creating/deleting) email accounts. To administer (manage/create/delete) email accounts, etc., please see this other article.

From your email account, you can check and send email as well as perform many routine email related tasks including changing your email password. We have other instructions in our faq here that explain how to use an email client such as Outlook/Eudora/Thunderbird/etc...

To login to the web-based email:

1. Log into the Webmail here: http://mail.mytechsupport.com
1. Or if if you prefer to go the long way:
1. Click the Login button in the upper-right corner of our website;
2. And then click the WebMail login link;
2. And then login with your username and password.
1. Your username is your entire email address, including the domain: e.g. "john_smith@my_domain.com"
2. If you have lost your password, please contact the person at your company who sets up and maintains (administers) your company's email accounts (if this is not yourself).

HOW TO:

Get the best free tools including: anti-virus's, email clients, firewalls, spyware protection, etc...

ANSWER

We do not support any of these 3rd party tools, but link to them here for your convenience. No one wants a virus, spyware or other things like that. People also often want an easy way to read email from their desktop. In our experinece these work almost flawlessly and may make your life easier. Use at own risk.

Antivirus: Web Browser: Email Client: Anti-Spyware/Adware: Firewall:

AVG and/or Avast Firefox (Mozilla) Thunderbird (Mozilla) Microsoft Windows Defender, Spybot & AdAware ZoneAlarm

HOW TO

How do I reduce the amount of SPAM I receive ?

ANSWER

Before I expain how to reduce spam, you should know the single most important way to avoid having to deal with this in the first place: Do not post your email address on the internet, or on your website. If you absolutely must do this, you can use an jpg image of it, or perhaps try to encode it with a program like this one. You should know that spammers harvest email addresses from websites.   And once they find an email address, there is no way to stop that kind of spam completely.  There are other ways spammers can find your email address, such as if someone else computer gets infected with a email virus, and you are in their address book. On average, 95% of all email is spam, and the problem is only getting worse. The only reason we all continue to get spam is because some people in the world respond to it—NEVER respond to spam.

You should do two things to filter your spam.  First, whether you use our webmail, or an email client like Outlook, you should setup a filter where the subject line is *****SPAM*****     This is because our spam system will tag, or label, any spam it catches with that phrase.  By creating a filter, anything with the phrase *****SPAM***** in the subject line will automatically get filtered, or moved, to your spam folder, or even directly to your trash if you prefer.

To setup a filter using webmail:

• Options > Filters > Edit/New Rule
• Subject contains the word *****SPAM*****
• move this to a new folder, or your trash.

To setup a filter using Outlook:

• Tools > Rules & Alerts > New Rule (etc...)
• Where Subject contains the word *****SPAM *****
• move this to your spam folder, or your trash.

We do not delete it because of the risk of false positives; or in other words, a legitimate email that was incorrectly tagged as spam, giving you complete control over your email. Many other companies simply delete any email they think is spam, thereby risking losing your important emails.

The second thing you should do is use an email client such as Outlook if at all possible. I receive 1000+ spam emails a week, and only a few make it past both the mail servers spam scanner, and Outlook's spam scanner.

Using your email program, or webmail to blacklist people only works if there is someone repeatedly spamming you, which is not very common these days.

If all of thse fail to reduce spam, let us know. Unlike many other companies, we are protecting you from a lot of spam and viruses at no additional cost to you&emdash;we always strive to make it even better.

HOW TO

How do I ensure I have a strong password ?

ANSWER

Failure to follow our password policy may result in the temporary locking or disabling of your account without advanced notice. Not following this policy creates a risk for you and us. Trust us on the fact that you should use really strong passwords whenever possible. Our password policy applies to any password you may have in our system (FTP, email, ecommerce, etc...)

Passwords should:

1. NEVER be a single word (any word in the dictionary), such as:
   • John
   • Microsoft
   • rainbow
   • Hawaii
2. NEVER be a single word with a few numbers at the end, such as:
   • John123
3. ABSOLUTELY not be any easy to guess words or patterns, such as:
   • test
   • password
   • demo
   • 1
   • 1234
   • 123456
   • 12435678
   • qwerty
   • !@#$%^&*
4. NEVER contain your username
5. NEVER be shorter than 8 characters; more is better.
6. SHOULD include numbers, letters (including upper-case letters), and special characters.

Examples of good passwords:

• John%@9234*
• myCompanyIzGr8!!!
• RainBoWP%#A

HOW TO

Can you setup/delete an email account for me, or change my email password ?

ANSWER

You must contact your account admin to do that for you (we can let you know who that is if you are unsure).

We cannot setup, remove, or edit email accounts for you simply because this can create real problems for some businesses. For example, a company might terminate an employee, who will then ask us to delete their account (e.g. so they can hide informaiton from their employer). This is also true for other actions such as creating email accounts and resetting passwords.

PROBLEM:

"Why am I suddenly getting lots of bounced emails to email addresses that do not exist at my domain ?"

ANSWERS

This is solved by NOT using a catch all email address. As a reminder, we will be phasing out this feature at some point

This happens when a spammer forges the return address on his emails. When they cannot be delivered the recipients, they will bounce back to that forged adddress. Spammers like to use real domains, and if you are getting these, then they have picked domain.

When you do not have a catch all setup, then this problem is eliminated. To remove your catch-all, login to the WebAdmin, go to "Email Manager" and then click the "remove" link next to the catch all.

It is much better in our opinion not to use a catch all for several reasons, including:

• You will get lots of junk mail in your catch all account.
• It is easy to overlook legitimate, but mis-addressed emails. If someone is trying to send you an email, but they mis-spell your email address, it normally will bounce back to them, lteting them know they have send it to an incorrect email address
• We may phase out the catch-all feature in the future because the shear volume of forged email that we get.
• It makes the servers work much harder the process all the fake email.

Some people then ask us if there is a way to prevent this kind of spoofing of return email addresses. The answer is yes, but only for the recipients email server. Basically, the recipients server can check a special signature to see if it really came from our servers. If it didn't then it will delete/ignore it. Most companies are not doing this because of the problems it causes.

PROBLEM:

"I am unable to send email using Outlook/Eudora/or other email client."

ANSWERS

If Outlook pops up an error message with a code beginning with 0x800...then please look it up in our table of contents. If you can send email, but it bounces back, then again, please refer to the appropriate section in our table of contents. Otherwise, please continue here.

This is usually caused because

• A. You are not authenticating before sending email the first time.
• B. You do not have the correct Outlook settings.
• C. You have a anti-virus, Firewall, or internet security program blocking Outlook--typically Symantec's Norton or McAfee.

• D. Your blocked by spam scanners because your email is sending viruses.

A. You are not authenticating before sending email the first time.

In your email account settings, look for a checkbox that says "My outgoing server requires authentication," and make sure it's checked.

Or, another way to do this is to set your email client settings to automatically Send/Receive when the email client starts.

B. You do not have the correct Outlook settings.

The number one mistake people make is not putting in their correct username correctly. To verify that your email client settings are correct, please refer to the following guide (for Outlook)

C. You have a anti-virus, firewall, or other internet security program blocking Outlook--typically Symantec's Norton or McAfee.

These types of programs are over-aggressive in our opinion and do not do well with Outlook. Although such issues are not directly caused by, nor supported by our systems, we believe in helping our customers as much as possible.

You can check to see if this is the cause by simply going into your antivirus/firewall/security program and disabling email scanning. We also recommend uninstalling your Norton/Symantec product as this often solves the problem. If email starts working, then you can be assured that that program is the problem.

To fix this check or disable your antivirus/firewall/internet security programs email settings. If your only solution is to disable the program, then try one of our other recommended programs listed at the top of this page.

D. Your blocked by spam scanners because your email is sending viruses.

This often happens when you get a virus, irregardless if you are running an antivirus. Please check the XBL and SBL maintained by Spamhaus.org, since our virus scanner uses this service to filter virus infected emails. Do a lookup on their site using the ip address in the bounced email you receive (e.g. 67.50.44.999). If it is listed, follow their instructions to remove it, then you might want to get some more anti-virus software to clean your computer since your computer is probably infected with a virus and is being used to send thousands of emails (with viruses or spam in them).

PROBLEM

"When trying to send email using Outlook/Eudora/or other email client, it takes a long time (more than a minute) before the mail actually sends."

ANSWERS

This is usually caused by a conflict between Norton Internet Security by Symantec, and Outlook.

To find out for sure, simply go into your Norton settings and disable the "Email scanning" feature. If you can send mail, then you can be sure the problem is between Norton and Outlook.

If so, you can resolve this using any of the following steps:

• Disable Norton's email scanning

• Contact Symantec or your IT administrator.

• Use a different anti-virus program instead of Norton such as AVG or Avast. Both offer free versions for personal use: AVG FREE and Avast FREE, and both have much higher user ratings than Norton and McAfee. Some people actually run both AVG and Avast together (running both together will slow down your computer if your computer is older/slower).

• Use our webmail to send and receive email--not as full featured as Outlook, but will Use a different email program instead of Outlook, such as Thunderbird (Mozilla's free email client)--Norton and McAfee have occasional problems with Thunderbird as well, so this is recommended as the last option.

PROBLEM

Error message: "Please enter network password"

ANSWERS

This is caused by having the incorrect username or password in Outlook. Be sure that the username is the full email address (e.g. you@yourdomain.com). As for the password, you may want to reset it through the web admin. You can easily test if you are using the correct user name and password by trying to log into our web based email. If you are not the administrator on your company's account, then you need to contact them to reset your email password.

PROBLEM

"Email bounces back; or , getting an error message similar to
553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1).

ANSWERS

This is usually caused by one of the following.

• A. Your ISP is blocking your outgoing email on port 25.
• B. Our servers are not able to authenticate you.

In either case, you may receive an error message similar to the following:

"553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1)"

If the bounced email looks a bit different, then please check "Your blocked by spam scanners because your email is sending viruses." under the section: unable to send emails

A. Your ISP is blocking your outgoing email on port 25.

Resolution: Change the default outgoing SMTP port to port 26 (detailed instructions below).

Diagnosing: An easy way to tell if this is really the problem is to test Outlook (or other email client) on another computer in your office). If it happens again, then this is likely the problem. Especially if you have had your email service with us for awhile, but have not made any changes recently on your computer(s).

Explanation: Some ISP's like AOL, Sprint, etc. try to block their customers (a.k.a. you) outgoing email, unless you are using their own email system as they do not want their customers using their internet connection to possibly send spam (accidently through a virus, or on purpose).

Step-by-step How-to: In Outlook and Outlook express you can go to the "Tools" menu, then "Accounts," select the email account, the "properties", you will need to locate the "Advanced" tab, or in Outlook, click the "More settings" button, then "Advanced". There should see the default ports for POP (or POP3) and SMTP, change the value for SMTP (outgoing) from 25 to 26. Click "ok," "finish," etc... then close your email client and restart it. We have screen shots below for Outlook and Outlook Express. If you are using a different email client you will need to use the help file that came with the client in regards to SMTP port, or locate it in the settings. Most modern email clients will allow you to do this.

Outlook XP "; Outlook 2003

Outlook Express 5 or higher

B. Our servers are not able to authenticate you.

This can be due to a number of factors. The first thing to check is your settings in your email client (Outlook/Eudora/Thunderbird/Etc...). Go to "Tools" > "Accounts", then select the email account, go to the "Advance Settings" (or "More Options") and look for the option which is something similar to "My outgoing server requires authentication;" check-mark this option as well as the option which reads something similar to "Log on to incoming mail server before sending mail."

If this is already set up properly, please check with your email administrator to make sure your email account is in the list of email accounts.

PROBLEM

Error message ending with any of the following error codes:
0x800ccc0F
0x800ccc13
0x800ccc19

ANSWERS

A lot of things can cause this problem (here is a complete list of possible causes by Microsoft), but we found that it is typically caused by one of the following:

• A. You received an email with a malformed header.
• B. You are running Symeantec's Norton Internet Security.
• C. Your ISP is blocking your outgoing email on port 25.

   

A. You received an email with a malformed header.

A vulnerability exists in Outlook 2002 (and sometimes in Outlook Express) in its processing of e-mail header information. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could send a specially malformed e-mail to a user of Outlook 2002 that would cause the Outlook client to fail under certain circumstances. The Outlook 2002 client would continue to fail so long as the specially malformed e-mail message remained on the e-mail server. The e-mail message could be deleted by an e-mail administrator, or by the user via another e-mail client such as Outlook Web Access or Outlook Express, after which point the Outlook 2002 client would again function normally.

Affected Software: Microsoft Outlook 2002

Patch availability: Microsoft Outlook 2002

To fix this without using Microsoft's patch:

Log into your web-mail account. Next, look for a message where the "From" line says " " The subject line will also say [no subject].If you have a lot of email and have difficulty finding this malformed email, you can sort your messages by size; these malformed emails are very small. Delete this message (by check-marking it, then at the bottom of the page click the "delete" button). You may also need to purge the deleted email, which basically just empties your trash can. To do this, click on the "purge deleted" button on the lower right of the page. In Outlook, click Send/Receive.

B. You are running Symantec's Norton Internet Security.

From your Norton control panel, disable email scanning / internet protection. If this does not work, then uninstall Norton COMPLETEY as we have discovered Norton to be the cause 95% of all email issues. If email works again, then you can rest assure Norton is the cause of it. You can contact Norton, and/or try the recommend free tools listed at the top of this page.

C. Your ISP is blocking your outgoing email on port 25.

This is explained in our other FAQ article here.

PROBLEM

Error messages ending with the error code: 0x800ccc0E

ANSWER

This is usually caused by one of the following.

• A. You need to change the server information.

• B. Your ISP is blocking your outgoing email on port 25.

• C. Your email account is non-existant.

A. You need to change the server information.

In your Outlook settings, under mail server settings, change your incoming mail server from mail.YourDomain.com to mail.mytechsupport.com; likewise with the outgoing server should be changed to smtp.mytechsupport.com. If you really prefer for us to fix this (so you can keep it : mail.YourDomain.com) then drop us a note, but it may take a day or so to update. If using Outlook express, you may need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

B. Your ISP is blocking your outgoing email on port 25.

Under your account settings, under advanced settings, change port 25 to port 26. For more information, and a step-by-step how to, please see this other faq

It is possible that the person responsible for managing your email account has deleted the account. Please contact that person to ensure your email account is still valid.

PROBLEM

Error messages ending with the error code: 0x800ccc7D

ANSWER

This is usually caused by having the box check "This server requires a secure connection (SSL)".

Click Tools / Accounts / Mail / Properties / Advanced - remove tick from secure SSL connection.

PROBLEM

Our spamming policy / What to do if infected with a mass emailing virus

ANSWER

We will often send you an email to the following effect:

"It appears that your computer may be infected with a virus and is using Outlook to mass email (spam) people. This creates issues for us and the rest of our customers. We will need to disable your email address if this problems persists.

You may refer to your company's IT rep, or continue reading to attempt to fix this yourself.

Please refer to our support page to run the best antivirus, antispyware software to ensure your computer is rid of the virus. Look at the top right section of this page, where it says “Best free tools” email support page

To avoid getting viruses, run at least one (we recommend two) antiviruses, and a good antispyware program, as well as ensuring that you are running the latest windows updates. Be sure the antivirus is running on your email client if you are running one (e.g. Outlook / Eudora / Thunderbird).

No single anti-virus program will catch all viruses, even for programs that make claims, such as Norton; In fact, we advise against using Norton as it can cause many issues with Outlook, and causes most problems reported to us by our users (check the reviews at Download.com if you want a second opinion).

You should also never install software unless you are 100% sure it is spyware/adware/virus free. Many “free” programs, games, IM smileys, P2P applications (e.g. Kazaa) available today are loaded with such spyware/viruses.

You should also not visit sites of dubious origin as your computer can also get infected from simply visiting a malicious website.

Viruses often come in email attachments, even if it is from someone you know; Basically, if their computer gets infected, then their computer can automatically email you the virus; or even through an instant messenger like AIM, MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, etc… and can sometimes even install itself without opening the attachment if you use an email program like Outlook

We do not offer end user, personal computer support, but there are many companies that do if you need additional help in removal of viruses, or other computer issues."

Quite often you will get a message from a blacklist like Spamcop, CBL, XBL, Spamhaus, with specific instructions of why you were blacklisted.