The Malaysia Email Hosting Blog

There have been a number of issue going on lately with the Globe Crossing backbone connectivity.

1. Check external POP3 account through its webmail interface
2. Allow you to send out email through other identity
3. Setup Gmail in your POP3 email client such as Outlook

No doubt, Gmail has the most reliable infrastructure to support its webmail access compared to other free Webmail service providers. Not to mention the most user-friendly interface and unlimited mailbox!

On a recent ISP interruption that happens to affect all international connection (outside Malayia), Gmail seems to be the only one who survive from this. I believe this must be something to do with their cross-nation infrastructure with high dedundancy support!

So, how to make your Gmail to be able to send out email that look like your business email?

Login to your Gmail. Go to Settings and select Accounts. Choose ‘Add another email address’.

Enter the email address you wish it to appear in your recipients’ From field when receiving your email. Please remember, if you want to receive the reply via your Gmail too, you need to enable the forwarding of your business email to Gmail as well!

“I can’t access your Webmail, but can browse other websites…”

Apparently, customers convince such test confirm that the said Webmail is down! But, this is not always true.

It depends on the location of web servers that host the website. Your ISPs connect you to the outside world using different networks. Problem can occur to just local or international connection.

That means, if the said Webmail is hosted in overseas while customers are browsing a locally hosted website, this will create an assumption that the Webmail is down!

Solution, email servers hosted with geographically-dispersed network in both your country and overseas!

Your router, web and email servers and many other online services depend on the DNS servers heavily to resolve domain name to its designated IP address.

Well, it seems to be perfectly well to use just both primary & secondary servers in most cases. Don’t take this for granted! Fill up all empty DNS fields with other pairs of DNS too!

“I can browse website, but why I can’t send & receive email using my Outlook Express?”

Website runs on Port 80, different from mail server which uses port 25 or 110. Browsing website means you are downloading data. Your ISP gives you different download and upload speed, it is not the same.

Well, sending out email is different from browsing website. You upload the data (or your mail) to the mail server for delivery.

Give details. Please remember that you’re the one seeing the error and many times, you’re the only one seeing that error. Folks can’t read minds or else they would be in Vegas playing cards instead of trying to help other folks on the email support :)

We do understand how bad is, when the email is down. Few questions that I would ask as a Email Support people:

1. How do you access your email? Outlook Express or Webmail?

2. You can’t send out email, please tell us what is the error message you are seeing?

Cool down….

Never bogged down by email! Lily, our admin in the office, used to receive more than 50 emails a day. Most of the email, are forwarded message because her email was in those lists.

After some serious clean up and removal of unnecessary email aliases, she is left out with only 2-5 emails a day!

Less operation, more time for marketing!

I have came across friends who subscribe to third party Spam filtering service by routing their email to a Spam filtering server before arriving at one’s mailbox. Why one should pay more when this is actually part of email hosting service providers’ responsibility to keep Spam away? And, you have just created a new bottleneck between sender and you!

More than 500 Spam mails come to my mailbox everyday. Out of this, 80% of them are filtered automatically before even reaching my mailbox. The rest of them are moved to the Spam folder in my Webmail.

On and off, I login to my mailbox and Whitelist’ those emails which are not Spam. After weeks of whitelisting, I hardly find any legimate email landed in this Spam folder.

I am a Outlook Express supporter. I use and live with Outlook Express after my first email. Before downloading my email from the mailbox server, I have practised a habit to login to Webmail and Blacklist’ those email which could be Spam! In fact, after few weeks of blacklisting, I have getting lesser Spam mails nowadays!

One of our server’s hard drive crashed yesterday. After the 10 rushing hours of restoring data and swaping server, we have finally fixed everything and ready to go, it is already late night 2am!

This can never be done without the very promptly support from our service provider, Emerge. Their 24 hours support hotline lead us to two of their very friendly technical support team, Bala and Lee. We their immediate assistant and kindest support, it is never cool inside the data centre, it is warm!

I have hundreds of email coming in everyday. Over the years, I am trying several methods to make sure I am always stay responsive to all email received…

1. Manage email even faster. I use Outlook Express instead of Webmail.

2. Reduce email received. I never stop marking those Spam mail to blacklist, revise my message rules, etc. Always, look at why the email comes to you. Solving the problem and receive less email seems to be the better way that manage email faster.

When it comes to business email, reliability is the main concern. Check their uptime and don’t save! While personal email, go for Gmail - one with many features you can’t find with others.

Mailman - Installed in a Linux box, this open-source email broadcast tools allow you to send out hundred of thousands emails in a day with its build in SMTP server. Perfect solution for Mailing List but lack of personalization (considering Mailman is used for really-large-volumn email broadcast, we don’t suggest personalization too during delivering).

Groupmail - Web-based software. Get yourself the Professional version which allow you to connect to any external database. It is fast, easy to use and most reliable one!! We have been switching from Mailman, Phplist to this, and one of the best options!

I guess no one like to receive big files especially when you are using email clients such as Outlook Express. Try Sendspace.com, this website allows you to upload up to about 100MB of file to their server and provide you with a download link (which will be expired after a month or so).