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Common Email Issues On Mobile Devices

Most of us have smartphones with our email accounts configured on them. But this article is aimed at those who are just learning to get addicted to mail on their smartphone. We have compiled a list of common issues which may intimidate you when you setup your smartphone to receive email.

Mails Disappear From Server

This is one of the most common problems that occur when a new mobile device has been configured to accept mail. This is especially prevalent when an email account is being shared by multiple persons in an organization. The problem that occurs is that the shortly after the new mobile phone or tablet is configured with the email account, the mails are downloaded onto that device. However, after they are downloaded, they disappear from the webmail of the account or cannot be downloaded onto a desktop client which has that account configured. This happens when your mobile device is configured to “Remove mails from the server once they are downloaded”. You simply need to set this option not to delete from server after they are downloaded, so that other devices and mail clients can also download them. You may also have the option of deleting the downloaded mails from the server after a certain number of days. Setting this option will clear your online mailbox continuously.

Incorrect Login Details

Another common issue is providing wrong login credentials to your email client. While password issues are easily identifiable, many people dont realize that their username is also as important. Wrong spellings, adding extra characters, leaving trailing spaces and forgetting to put @domainname.com at the end of the username are all common problems which you may face when configuring an account on your mobile device.

Incorrect Port Numbers

Another known configuration nightmare is entering the correct port number which your email server uses to allow mail access from remote devices. There are various port numbers which different providers use, but most commonly, port 110 is used for incoming mail through POP3 and port 143 is used to receive mail through IMAP. Port No. 25 is used to send outgoing mail i.e. through SMTP. If you select a security protocol for your server, you also need to change the port number to secure ports. This is where the most confusion occurs. You can always consult your email provider for the correct settings and recommendations.

SSL / TLS / STARTTLS Issues

Another common headache when configuring email on your mobile devices is finding out what security protocol to use. The mail server needs to provide support for that system so that your device and server can both create a secure connection for transferring your mail. STARTTLS is a modern protocol which is not commonly used by all mail servers. Some devices offer the option to “accept all certificates” which you need to select to ensure that the configuration process goes through smoothly. Else, you may need to manually accept the certificates when a warning pops up on your screen.

New Mail Does Not Show Up Immediately

Although this issue is not related to the server, many users complain that their mails are not being shown instantly or that they are not being notified of the arrival of a new email when it comes into their webmail. This is most definitely due to the fact that account syncing is not enabled on your device or that the sync time for your phone has been set to a high value. This means that if your device is set to sync every 30 minutes, you will not be notified of a mail which was received in the interim period of 30 minutes. Lowering this value will cause the phone to constantly check with the server for any new mails, but may be costly on battery life and data usage.

Why Free Business Email Services Like Google Apps Are No Longer Free

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Google Apps, Microsoft’s Outlook.com and many other smaller providers used to offer free business email accounts. This lured a lot of people into moving their business mail to these giant corporations. However, when these giants withdrew these free services around 2012 to 2014, there was a mass exodus of users to the regular paid email services. Although users who had signed up prior to the free account withdrawal were “grandfathered” in and allowed to continue using their accounts, there were very few upgrade options for them. This article deals with why most of the free business email services did not find it lucrative to continue their services at no cost.

Support

One of the most important concern for free email users was tech support. When you do take an email service for your business, when your business expands and the Proprietor is not the same as the IT Chief, then you know that you have outgrown the free services. The paid services of most of these providers was prohibitively expensive for most types of businesses. People expected a lot of support and assistance in managing and setting up their account. This is something that Google and Microsoft lacked. Although they did appoint authorized service providers to help local businesses, the continuous support requirement was getting overwhelming. This meant that for a free service, these companies would need to hire support personnel, without getting any direct returns. We must remember that companies like Google and Microsoft did not aim to make money from their mailing services. Their aim was to make money from profiling users for advertising revenue. Microsoft’s story is similar. Hence there was no intent to put back the money in giving any more than their standard free features.

Configuration

Going hand in hand with support are the configuration issues that people used to face. Almost every user at some point in time will need to configure or sync or connect their account with some hardware device of theirs. Whether its a mobile phone or desktop or laptop, this was inevitable and should have been foreseen. However, Google Apps and Microsoft lacked the basic support infrastructure that paid email providers were offering. Hence, even though their service was free, their support partners charged money and made up for the free service. This money did not benefit Google or Microsoft and hence did not help them in any way. There was no direct incentive for offering free email services, especially when people required extensive support when setting up their account.

Expensive

Google Apps for business is priced at $50 per user per year, whereas Microsoft charges $48 per user per year at the minimum. When you realize that they also offer a free email service till today, you feel cheated. In effect you feel that you are actually paying for something which is being given out for free. What most people don’t realise is that the free accounts come without any support or without any assistance. But nobody wants to pay just for the additional support. Although the companies are justified in their pricing, they are not able to match competition, due to the simple fact that they have large expenses. Just like all other branded products, business email from these large corporations also costs more, without any visual value addition.

What About Website Hosting?

Why Free Business Email Services Like Google Apps Are No Longer Free

A big put off for people who used services like Google Apps and Outlook.com was that they wanted a one stop solution which included their website hosting, file storage and email. While Google Apps offered business email, it left a big void as far as web hosting was concerned. Google did offer alternatives like Google Sites, but the options left a lot to be desired. Almost all the business email options offer their own website editor with a limited number of templates. Beyond that no customizations can be made. The same was the case for Microsoft’s Outlook and Office 360 service. This is one of the main factors why people prefer conventional web hosting, even if they have a free option.

Will Webmail Be The Future Of Email Storage?

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Will Webmail Be The Future Of Email Storage?

With email being a primary mode of formal and official communication around the world, an important question that should be asked is that how and where will users store their data. As data storage evolved and modes of storage cross conventional limitations, innovations in Information technology has taken thing to the next level. People have stopped using their desktops for storing their email and prefer to have webmail storage which allows them to access their mail from any location at any time without dependence on any hardware. This article discusses the factors which may influence a users decision in using webmail for storing email.

Mobile Devices

Mobile devices have a lesser capacity to store as compared to our desktops and laptops. Mobile devices are used more for storing entertainment material like movies, games and music rather than emails and office work. Hence, people using mobile devices are more likely to keep their emails on their mail server rather than downloading them

Cheap Disk Space

As hardware prices reduce, so does the price of disk space. Both physical hard disk drives and even virtual storage space costs lesser and lesser day by day. Due to economies of scale, online storage space works out far cheaper (per GB) as compared to a hard disk. This encourages email users to outsource their email storage to an online solution rather than to have the headache of managing and storing the emails on their local computer.

Cloud Storage

A major reason why people will not download mails on their phones or computers is because of lack of accessibility. We all want a single location for managing our mail and documents. Earlier people would use multiple devices to download their mail and were virtually locked in to that device to manage their emailing. This meant that any hardware failure would lead to work disruption. Similarly backups were also tougher to make on a specific device. Your entire online life depended on that one device. If you bought a new device or upgraded it, you would need to carefully migrate your data. Today’s world is platform independent. You are not locked in to one type of device or one specific device. With web mail and online storage you can access your mails from any device. Your mail client only becomes a viewing tool and not a storage tool. It doesnt matter how you access your mail when it is online. You can use a laptop, desktop, mobile phone or even a browser enabled device to see your mails.

Profile Personalization

Another important feature after storage is singularity of your customization and profile. Many of us have our email signature stored with our email clients. If we use our mobile phone, we have to reset our email signature. If we use a separate webmail client, we need to reconfigure our entire signature and email preferences all over again. With webmail, any device you are on will have the same settings as other devices which access your mail. You don’t need to bother about the consistency of your email preferences or personal customization to your profile or email interface as it is always consistent.

How Should You Report Spam Mail For Quick Action?

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How Should You Report Spam Mail For Quick Action?

We are all affected by the scourge of spam mail. Many of us receive thousands of emails which are fortunately filtered out by our email services or email software. The main issue that everyone has with spam is that it prevents us from noticing genuine mail, which may get lost in the noise of continuous junk. Spam delays or prevents us from getting to our legitimate or important mails. There are various agencies around the world, in many countries dedicated to fighting spam mail and protecting the interests of email users across service providers. There are various agencies which you can complain to about spam. This article explains how you can complain about spam mail and get some effective remedy.

SpamCop

SpamCop.net is a spam reporting service which complains about spam on your behalf, to the service provider of your spammer. When you report a spam mail to spamcop, it forwards your complaint to the correct authority in charge of the IP Address or network of the origin of the spam mail. It picks out the Abuse Complaint details of the network provider and sends a pre-drafted email filled in with the details applicable to your complaint. The best part about spamcop is the enforce ability of the complaint. SpamCop provides spam activity information and statistics to various anti-spam filter services which use these details to block mail even before they reach a mail server. If you are blacklisted due to a spamcop complaint, your IP Address will no longer be able to send out emails to people who are using those blacklists and filters. If that happens, mails from your server will be delayed or will bounce. If your are providing an email service, your service will be disrupted till the spam doesnt stop.

The Abuse Email Address of the IP Address Owner

The email address of the network owner maybe a bit hard to find out, but it should surely yield some results. Most Network Operation Centers, Data Centers and Hosting Providers take abuse complaints very seriously. Action on abuse complaints includes disconnection of services or even temporary suspension of the offender’s service. The abuse contact is supposed to be a one-point communication address by which anyone aggrieved by the behaviour of a certain subscriber or network can report the issues to that person. You can find out the abuse email address of a domain name by visiting abuse.net or simply sending a mail to the default abuse address i.e. abuse@domain_name.com or postmaster@domain_name.com where domain_name is the actual domain name which appears to be sending out spam.

Government Spam Reporting Systems

Various countries around the world have passed anti-spam laws to help tackle the scourge of spam mail. Federal Trade Commission in the USA, Canada Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) Reporting Center in the Canada host an email spam reporting service, which in turn forwards your complaint to the appropriate network operator. The limitation of these bodies is that they may not be able to do much for email or hosting services which are located beyond its territorial jurisdiction.

Mail Client or Webmail Plugin

Nowadays there are many tools available to email users for reporting spam or sending complaints about email service abuse. Webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail have a “Report Spam” button or a “This look like spam” which not only places a complaint but also filters out similar messages in future, by educating the spam control system. Mail client’s like Outlook also have various add-ins to report and delete spam. Some Anti-virus and Firewall software offer integrated email scanning which automatically reports suspicious bulk emails to a central command system.

The Evolution Of Passwords: What Are The Alternatives?

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The Evolution Of Passwords: What Are The Alternatives?

With the internet being an indispensable part of life, passwords have also become an integral dilemma. With more and more facilities coming up online, each facility requires different types of passwords based on length and strength. Some require you to put in a special character, others may want a CAPITAL letter and others may want you to do a back flip as well. The odd part about passwords is that not many people seem to have invested their time, money and resources into investigating what the alternatives to passwords could be. Some services offer to remember your passwords while others offer to automatically fill them into your web forms, but this doesnt really solve the problem of passwords.

With 2 factor authentication becoming more popular, passwords have to share their space of glory with other authentication tokens or methods. 2 Factor Authentication matches “something you know” with “something you have” and thereby allows you to sign in.

Audio and Visual Passwords

Using Audio and Visual means to authenticate is becoming more and more popular across the internet. Services like Clef provide a system by which an image on your phone app is matched with an image on the login screen of your website, by using the phone’s camera. This image matching causes the system to authenticate and allows you to login. Its something like how a bar code is read by a scanner and the entry is automatically filled in. Illiri goes a step further by transmitting passwords in audio form.

OTP by SMS / Email

A lot of websites with sensitive information often send a second password or a One Time Password to your email or mobile phone by SMS. This acts as a second layer of security to establish your identity. You have to then enter the exact same character string into your login box along with or after entering your password. Banks use this to authenticate high value transactions and also before you make important changes to your account profile. The limitation in this system is that you have to have mobile phone connectivity or access to your email at the same time that you want to do the transactions. This can be quite a limiting factor if you are travelling. Some banks also provide phone apps to allow you to generate the number using the app rather than sending the OTP by SMS. However, this system can be easily fooled if the impersonator has your password and mobile phone or email access.

Bio-metrics

Another way of replacing passwords is by using certain unique elements of the human body. Modern bio-metrics use Fingerprints, Retina Scans and even Face Recognition to help you authenticate even if you suffer from memory loss. Increased reliance on bio-metrics is visible from the integration of a fingerprint scanner in iPhones and also the launch of many laptops for home use with face recognition and also finger print readers. Although bio-metrics are somewhat unique, they don’t remain fool proof and also can be inconvenient. Hence, all devices which come with bio-metrics also have an alternate password or PIN option to authenticate.

Physical Tokens

Banks use physical tokens or “dongles” which generate a random number which must be put in with the password at the time of authentication. This is a replacement to the OTP, to ensure that there is no middle-man or interceptor who can steal your OTP when it is being sent by the bank by SMS or email. Physical tokens have a high chance of being lost or forgotten. Further, they maybe reverse engineered and misused by hackers.

As it is famously known that “security and convenience are inversely proportional”. This means that the more security you have, the less convenient it is and the more conveniences you have, the less secure they make you. True to this, no matter what security measures we try and implement, the human element will be the weakest link in the chain of security.

Why Your Web Hosting Account Is More Important Than Your Internet Banking Account

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Why Your Web Hosting Account Is More Important Than Your Internet Banking Account

We often neglect securing devices and services which don’t result in a direct loss of money to us. We take them for granted and live in hope that they will never get compromised, or better still, we may live in a false sense of security that those devices or services will never get compromised or fall prey to wrong-doers. One such area of concern is the Web Hosting Account. We have seen numerous persons and businesses who are so careless about the security of their hosting account, that they will only learn when a major “hack” or compromise leaves them stranded.

Official Email Address

If you are using an official email address of your company or business, it would be foolish if you don’t take care of your account. Regularly changing the password and setting a long tough password is ideal. You should also scan your network and computers for virus or malware on a regular basis, especially on the computer where your email address is configured. Your email address is interlinked with various other accounts of other services. Your banking, your utilities and your clients information is all stored in the email account. If your email address gets hacked or the password falls into the wrong hands, it may be the beginning of a disastrous journey to recover the account and retrieve any lost or stolen information.

Your Website

Your hosting account also contains access to your website, which is another reason why special care should be taken to keep the passwords and logins safe. The website represents your business online and is the online face of your brand or organization. Just like you would not want someone to misrepresent your brand or create confusion in the minds of your clients, the same way you should protect your website from unauthorized access and defacement. If you are selling products online and also collecting payments, then you need to ensure that the payments and sensitive personal information of the clients is safe and cannot be compromised. Ensure that your Main Control panel password is not shared with anyone. If your website developer needs to upload or download files, he can be given an FTP login with restricted access to only the necessary folders. If some database needs to be accessed, then only the database login needs to be given. If you do end up giving your control panel password, ensure that you change it once the work is over. Also ensure that you take backups of get backups taken before and after the work is done. This way you will be able to compares changes and identify any unneeded changes.

Business Secrets

You may often store business secrets or confidential information in your hosting account. This could include plans and drawings of inventions, customer information, employee information, price lists and even something as simple as a suppliers list. If these are exposed, it could lead you to lose out on a lot of business and cause immense damage to your contractual obligations. Business Secrets are always on the hunting list of competitors and people will jump to the opportunity of getting information which will benefit their business. Following strict practices of physical and online security will ensure that your data remains safe. Using multiple login names and passwords on each computer will help you identify the flow of compromise, incase you are ever a victim.

Automation Tools and Web Applications

If you are using an eCommerce or Billing Software and have set it to perform actions on your behalf, it may be quite disastrous if someone got a hold of it. This would cause a major loss of goodwill and would immediately lower your reputation in the eyes of clients. Following the same practices for securing your website can also be followed here. However, more care needs to be given when you are authorizing a software to communicate on your behalf.

Having Your Own Domain Name For Using Email Addresses, A Professional Approach

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When you buy a domain name, to preserve your business name or for building a web presence, it is always behooves you to purchase a domain name. It is always more professional for you to use your own domain name for email addresses. You can create email addresses @yourdomain.com such as [email protected] or [email protected] This seems more professional to your customers, or suppliers. There are a few issues with using such an email address;

1. Can you also use your other email address @gmail or @hotmail or another free email provider ?

Yes you can. In fact you would be able to integrate your new email address into your free email account, such as your hotmail account or gmail account. You can receive your new email there and also send email using your new email address from your existing free email account. You need to purchase an email service from a web hosting provider, and follow the instructions to set up a POP3 or an IMAP account, to link it to your email other account.

2. Can you also continue to use your other email address ?

Yes, you can. You can - you can continue to use your other email such as your hotmail or yahoo address, that you use.

3. Can you use outlook or outlook express with your new email address ?

Yes, you would be able to configure your email account in Outlook or Outlook Express.

4. Will you be able to use your email account on your cellular phone, or smart phone ?

Yes, you will be able to use your email account through IMAP or POP3 on your smart phone, and use the email account on your phone. The advantage of this would be, that you would not be restricted to the free email providers. You will be able to send email from your email @ yourdomain.com to anyone, right from your smart phone.

5. Will it help you from a search engine optimization perspective ?

Yes, you need to have your own domain name, for google to take you seriously. Targeted traffic from google will not come to you if you use a free email service, such as hotmail. Google gives a lot of importance to genuine content, and it would be extremely difficult for google to know that the content is yours if you use a free email address.

6. What other advantages are there to having a domain name and email address ?

It gives you privacy. You are away from the prying eyes of google and other free email providers. If you use a free email address, you are exposing your email data to the prying eyes of the providers. The providers would crawl the data and use that to send you contextual advertisements on the screen while you are checking your email. This is how they make money to provide you the service. You are also opening yourself up to others subpoenaing your email provider to furnish your email data.

Conclusion

It is always better to use your own private email address with your own hosting provider. This is not as expensive as it sounds, and most providers provide this service at about $2 per month for a small business, and at about $4 per month for larger organizations.

Here at HostingXtreme, we provide an email hosting service, and you could get your email hosting and a domain name for a small business at about $1.51 per month. We also provide domain name registration services. Visit us for our unlimited hosting plan.