Posted by: pin on: 21 Oct, 2007
Plato Capital use Register.com’s DNS servers. We suspect both DNS servers are geographically not located in dispersed locations.
Plato Capital subscribes to Malaysia based email hosting service provider. Only 1 Mail Exchange (MX) record found. If the primary mail server is down or unreachable, there is a chance that mail may have troubles reaching you. In the past, mailservers would usually re-try E-mail for up to 48 hours. But many now only re-try for a couple of hours.
The current uptime report for Plato Capital mail server is acceptable. Current Webmail software might be an upgrade for improve email management.
Posted by: pin on: 20 Oct, 2007
If you are using Outlook Express and having problem sending out email using your default SMTP server… here is the solution. If you have a Gmail account, you can switch to using Gmail SMTP.
This is the error message on SMTP error
Change your default SMTP to smtp.gmail.com
Check ‘My server requires authentication’ and enter your Gmail username and password
Use secure connection and enter 465 as SMTP Port number.
Posted by: pin on: 17 Oct, 2007
1. It is quite confusing to have website’s domain name as www.guitarcollection.com.my and at the same time the email domain as guitar-collection.com.my, with the ‘-’ in it. It has always been a good practice to have one single domain for both web and email services.
2. Both DNS servers for guitar-collection.com.my are probably at the same physical location or data centre. In the event where the data centre is down, there is no redundancy support for DNS service.
3. One of the DNS server does not respond. This will worsen the situation because there will only be one DNS server working.
4. Apparently, the web and email servers are located in the same server. Due to the complexity of emails today (Spam control, webmail access, virus filtering, etc), it is not ideal to setup both services using just one single server. Obviously, this also shows that the server is without load-balancing or dedundancy support. Afterall, there is only one Mail Exchange (MX) record found!
P/S. Both guitar-collection.com.my and guitarcollection.com.my are pointing to a same website. They should have decided on one of the domain as the official domain, and direct the other to it using Redirect 301 method to accumulate PageRank values.
Posted by: pin on: 17 Oct, 2007
Even if you have a FAQ section, you are bound to receive many enquiries or support-related emails. One possible solution to this can be shown with the example below:
In the Cambodia e-Visa website, visitors will be asked if they have read the FAQ. If the answer if no, they will be redirected to the FAQ page, else they will proceed to the next screen.
A list of frequently asked questions extracted from the FAQ page are listed in this screen. Most questions can be answered in this page.
Finally, if all else fails and there were no answers to the visitor’s questions, visitors will be redirected to the Contact Us form. A verification code applet was installed to filter Spam enquiries as well.
Posted by: pin on: 17 Oct, 2007
Ever wondered how your website delivers the enquiries to you? What happen to the enquiries if for some reason email problems occured? Let’s categorize emails triggered from a website to two types of emails.
1. Email reminder (requires no action taken by reader, usually notification)
We suggest that the From field should looks something like noreply@xxx.com. Recipient should not attempt to reply to this reminder. Anyway, just to be sure you can still forward any reply sent to noreply@xxx.com to another email account (eg, tech@abc.com) and make sure you miss no email.
2. Email expecting some action (recipient will most likely hit the Reply button to reply)
The From field should come from an email which you wish to receive the email.
Your website should use some class file to connect to external SMTP or outgoing mail server in order to deliver the email. Avoid using built-in SMTP server such as Sendmail. Most of the time, it is not configured to be full-proof and it might mark your emails SPAM emails. It is also not a good idea to share web and email servers together.
Posted by: pin on: 16 Oct, 2007
Most businesses publish a more general mailbox such as sales@xxx.com or technical@xxx.com in their website or printed materials.
Always use Aliases for your general mailbox. Aliases receive email and automatically redirect to other email address that you specify. This is usually free and unlimited from your email hosting service provider. Check with them to find out the number of maximum email address you can specify (both outside domains and internals).
Imagine you have five sales representatives. Try to direct all emails from sales@xxx.com to every one of them at their individual mailboxes. Remember to add sales@xxx.com to the Bcc field when sending out emails from your sales representatives. On resignation (if any), what you have to do is to update the Aliases and make sure you forward it to the right person.
Posted by: pin on: 15 Oct, 2007
If you’re used to the conversation view in Gmail and want to have something similiar in Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook, here it is:
