The Malaysia Email Hosting Blog

Your email hosting can not work without DNS. The Mail Exchange (MX) records defined in the Zone file inside your DNS server tell where your email should go to. Usually, there are two DNS servers where one serves as backup. For those mission critical one, it is not surprised to see more than two nameservers been used.

POP

Best when you will be primarily accessing your email from a single location, like your office or home. When you leave your office or home, you can still access your email from a web browser.

Messages are downloaded to your computer, so you don’tneed to worry about exceeding the size of your mailbox.

When accessing your email account through a web browser, you may not see previous messages that were downloaded to your desktop email client.

IMAP

Best when you will be accessing your email from multiple locations.

Allows you to create portable folders. These folders will appear in each email client you use to access your account. Your account will look the same at work, at home, and at your friend’s house.

Because your email messages are stored on the server, you must monitor your mailbox size and delete messages to avoid exceeding your mailbox size.

You are using email clients such as Outlook or Outlook Express. Your notebook is not with you, and you have some old email to retrieve from your Webmail. The default setting in Outlook Express download all messages from the incoming mail server and remove them from server. That means, it leave no copy of messages in the server. If, you have huge space and you might run into some similiar case above, check ‘Leave a copy…’. It can help!

Just one thing, keeping too many email in your email server, might slow down your Outlook Express. Everytime when you download the message from the server, it takes some little longer time to initiate.

You have something to discuss, but your team members are scattered in different locations, working on different timezone… One good thing I like about discussion through email is, a loose questions get the feedback from those who has time for a quick reply. This can in fact, save time in face-to-face meeting, yet proven to be more productive. For sure, this might not work in all cases, especially if the team members are not used to this. This is an culture to nurture.

TM, in their official press release described the act to block all 3rd party as one of the step to fight Spam. Following this, most of the companies in Malaysia who is using Streamyx broadband are affected after switching to smtp-proxy.tm.net.my. Problem including email delay and lost.

One of the latest updates I have received is, email delivered / delayed through smtp-proxy.tm.net.my is also marked as Spam by many major free email service provider including Yahoo Mail!

For those who wish to change to new corporate-branded email address, but still wish to receive a copy of email sent to your jaring mailbox, you can write officially and fax to Jaring, together with your request printed on your letterhead. I have done once, and they responce and it works! Just to share, I am not too sure if are still doing this for their users?

1. Make sure your mailbox space can cope with this. When come to estimating the storage space you should have at least, do include days when you don’t access your email, especially during your holidays.

2. Handling your email become a nightmare when averagely you have at least more than 100 emails a day. Email clients or webmail without Conversation view can be a setback now. Slow webmail can cause serious problem too! Keyboard shortcut of email clients can move you further with extreme increase of email loads!

3. Reducing your email. This is the hard part! Online business is about Testing. New marketing plan and features on your website, are introduced in a faster pace. Testing means you are learning everyday. Without sharing of email, this can be a problem.

Do you expect the built-in camera better than a SLR camera?

If your email is bundling with your web hosting now, then please expect just a built-in camera quality of email service!

Malaysia Email Hosting Benchmark

Most web hosting companies offer email as a checklist item—something they spend very little time on. And while email hosting drives probably less than 1% of revenue for most of them, it likely drives up to 50% of support. What a bummer!

Most web hosting companies bundling email hosting (and use the magic word unlimited mailbox) as one of the feature in their web hosting package. You can google web hosting malaysia and you will be surprised how many of them are still bundling both.

Well, keyword like email hosting malaysia are seldom used even the customers are looking for email solution. This is weird, isn’t it.

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What happen when you try to send an email to 50 recipients? Send it one by one? Or dump all the 50 email addresses in a single email? Neither of them is a good solution. If you are sending one by one, it might take up to hours. If you do it the other way, most probably your email will be treated as spam or even block by your email hosting service provider. In this case, GroupMail could be a good help.

With the great grouping feature in GroupMail, you are allowed to categorize your email recipients into groups. Instead of sending email to a single email address, you are now allowed to send an email to groups of recipients.

Besides, you can also set a schedule using GroupMail. It is very useful if you are going to send a reminder. After the template and the schedule is ready, you can leave the rest to GroupMail.

Last but not least, you can still send the email using your own email account. You can have your email accout setup in GroupMail. However, it is strongly recommended to set an interval for the mass mailing task. You can limit it to one email in every 10 seconds or maybe 30 seconds to ensure that your email hosting provider do not yell at you for occupying their email server.

You have decided to change your email domain, from abc.com to xyz.com. You want all email sent to abc.com to be forwarded to xyz.com.

This can be done with no cost by changing your DNS to Zoneedit, one of the free DNS service provider. Login to your Zoneedit account and look for Mail Forwarding section. Use ‘*’ to catch all names before @abc.com! Email forwarding at DNS level can be done without using any email server, but with less control.

Read more What is Email Alias?

I have came across many big name companies, spending hundred of thousands setting up their in-house mail server using Exchange Mail Server. Instead of outsourcing, these companies spent extra time and money to maintain their email facilities.

No doubt Exchange is great, but that is wen you know how to fine-tunning it. Most of the businesses are not able to keep themselves updated especially when come to Exchange upgrade, patching of Spams & viruses, configuring for best performance…

Just like any other business, email is one of the most important tools for your business. Let the experts (a team of people, not a single in-house IT staff) to do the job for you, and you can stay focus in your business!

“1 out of every 10 notebook (laptop) computeres will be stolen within the first 12 months of purchase. 90% of them will never be recovered. -FBI Statistic-”

Apart from the data security breach, losing all your email without backup can be a serious business interruption!

Lucky This Time?

Each email alias you create simply forwards any message on to any email address that you specify. Most email service providers do not limit number of aliases one can have, but restricted to certain number of email address you can forward to.

It is handy for generic email such as sales@domain.com to forward to another email address. Thus, save you the cost of subscribing additional POP3 account. The only restriction is, you can’t send out email through Email Alias. But, you can override this if you are on Gmail, using the Gmail’s Identity features.

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 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!

If your email is important and you can’t afford the downtime during the migration of your email service from one provider to another provider - how?

During migration, your new DNS may not respond immediately due to the DNS propagation. This problem can be solved by setting up the new DNS server to have the Zone records as the old one.

With such setup, your email could be pointing to both new or old email server during the propagation. This is fine as long as the email doesn’t get lost. You can retrieve emails from the old server later.

Once the propagation process is over, you can update the Mail Exchange (MX) to activate the new email service. MX update takes place almost immediately. Now, all email will go to the new email server.

Apart from this, you have to pre-configure the new email server to have exactly the same user account as the old one.

Zero-downtime migration for email is possible!

Followed a new policy from TM today, all third-party SMTP servers are blocked except SMTP servers provided by Streamyx. This affects all users using TM ISP such as Streamyx Broadband or TM Dial-up on dynamic IP. Anyway, it does not affect user of Streamyx on fixed IP.

This reminds me those day when Jaring introduce the same method of blocking the use of external SMTP address. If you are on Jaring, you can’t send out email using TM SMTP, vice versa. This comman ISP SMTP-lock methods can be sometimes creating another set of problems,

1. People on the move on using different connections will have to swtch around SMTP…

2. The heavy load on the single ISP’s SMTP can cause email slow problem, and down sometimes.

Alternatively, many are switching to external SMTP on different Ports than 25. Check with your email hosting service provider if they can provide you SMTP on alternate port or even a secure SMTP will do help.

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.

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.

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.