The Malaysia Email Hosting Blog

Even wonder why your email or your friend’s email been marked as Spam? Apparently, your mail server has marked it as Spam and moved them from your Inbox to the Spam Box, or simply add the line [SPAM] in front of the subject of your email.
Of course, you can safelist/whitelist that particular email address so [...]

No doubt, both email and web hosting services need a domain name to work properly. Your broadband and web hosting service providers told you that the email services are freebies. It is bundled together and require less attention than the product they are selling!

Yet, many of us are spending more time emailing than visiting our own corporate website!

Technically speaking, email and web hosting are two completely different services, except that both of them share the same DNS servers. DNS servers host zone file that contains pointing information for both email and web requests.

This means, you can host your email with one service provider while web hosting with another.

If you have 10 questions to be included in your email, send out one at a time. Never start writing the rest 9 emails until you hear reply to your first message. Keep them short always! Never send out all 10 questions in one email.

The one and only reason - this can only happen when you have lost the ownership of your domain name (the address after ‘@’). Therefore, remember to renew your domain name.

If you are using Free webmail service such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Theoretically, you have no rights to their domain name, you can be removed from owning any mailbox on violation of their terms.

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?

If you are upgrading from Outlook Express to Windows Mail, you might need this helpful instruction posted by JAF.

1. Create a directory under the current user’s Documents, such as Documents\OEMail. This directory needs to be within the user’s space, such as under Documents, in order to prevent possible access permissions problems.
2. Copy all the dbx files from one Outlook Express Identity into this directory, ensuring that folders.dbx is included.
3. Go to Edit | Select all in Windows Explorer and select all the dbx files. Then right click on the selection and choose Properties and ensure that the read only attribute of the files is unchecked.
4. In Windows Mail go to File | Import Messages and choose Outlook Express 6 format and choose to import from a directory.
5. Then use the Browse button to browse to the directory of dbx files. Make sure that when you set the directory that what is listed in the path is correct (NOTE: Vista can put the wrong path in here sometimes, so instead of c:\mypath it puts c:\mypath\mypath, so check the path to verify that it is correct, and if it is not correct then fix it by clicking the Browse button a second time and then leave the selection blank and clicking Okay.).
6. Then select the files from which you wish to import messages and click Import.

If you are using Outlook Express and you have lot of email to manage daily, you should really try to enable the Conversion View! It sorts your messages in thread orders. No doubt, this can be sometimes kinda confusing because some new incoming message jump to nowhere hidden in the thread, but when you have used to it, it will become a Must-have!

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!

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!

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!

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).

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!

Outlook Express stores messages in a folder, location defined in Tools > Options > Maintenance > Store Folder. It converts every folder to respective .dbx file, for example inbox.dbx. Large dbx files turn Outlook Express to load slower.

Create New folder under Inbox. The format of the folder name should follow ‘Inbox-yyyy-mm’. Use the same format for your Sent box too. After you have created the folder, move all messages to their respective folder.

Close Outlook Express now. Go to the Store Folder, delete the file inbox.dbx and start Outlook Express again. The new inbox.dbx will be clean once again!

When you Cc’ someone when composing an email, you expect the reply from the recipient will go to you and the person in the Cc list. This will only happen if the recipient press the Reply All, instead of Reply.

So next time when you are replying an email, always hit Reply All!

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.

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: