Email Hosting

A large number of free email accounts are included with all of our web hosting packages. We typically don't provide email facilities without web hosting. All our hosting packages also include web based email, but you can also access your email account via POP3, SMTP or IMAP.

Web Email

• We can integrate email into your web page any way you like. (e.g. mail can be sent in response to form filling, shopping cart purchases, database queries, etc).
• We can provide a web mail interface using Horde Groupware Webmail. HGWM offers an excellent, fully-featured web mail interface, and using IMAP it can integrate well with conventional mail readers such as Outlook, Thunderbird and The Bat.
• We can provide a full email service for your domain with access via industry standard POP3, SMTP and IMAP protocols. We can also offer secure email and PGP.
• Our email system is fully compatible with Apple iPhone and RIM Blackberry.
• We provide a full range of functionality: e.g. redirection, auto response, spam filtering.
• We can map your domain mail servers to our servers or to servers that you already have set up.
• We can configure web mail to work directly with your servers, or your servers AND ours.
• We can integrate email and bboard systems.
• We have a backup mail-server facility.
• Our terms and conditions do not permit you to allow bulk email to be sent to people who haven't specially agreed to be sent it via double opt in process.

Mailing Lists

We can operate mailing lists, including very large mailing lists. A modern mailing list should use a double opt in system to stop you being charged with spamming. We can prepare all the code to perform the double opt in process for your list.

We can connect a mailing list to data collected from the web site.
e.g. Send so you can send personalised newsletters to your online clients. Of course if you store data on clients, you do need to conform with the appropriate legal provisions for data protection, though this is not particularly complicated.

What is double opt in?

It's typical to implement a system so that when a customer makes an order they can tick a box to be added to your mailing list (this is the first opt in). The double opt in system would then send them a single, short email asking them to confirm addition to the list by clicking on a specially generated (unique) link contained in the email. Once the user clicks this link, they are informing your site that the person who really owns the email address wants to receive email from the list (this is the second opt in). On receipt of the second opt in, it is legitimate to add the user's address to your mailing list. Presumably, if the user makes it through this process, they are actually interested in receiving your emails.

Systems where the user merely provides an email address and ticks a box are open to abuse by griefers and spammers, who may fill in email addresses that do not belong to them. While this is usually only an annoyance to the victim, in cases where the list sends forum digests or similar material, it provides a backdoor for sending spam.

What use is a mailing list?

There is a big difference between email users want to receive, and spam: unsolicited email they didn't want. Properly targeted email advertising and promotions can be a powerful tool in promoting your site and your business. Providing you explain clearly up-front to the user the sort of emails they will reveive when they sign onto your list, then they will be usually be happy to receive your emails.

If you only have a few customers, you can easily send out a mailshot using your favourite email program. If you want to reach a large number of customers, this isn't feasible. Maintaining the address list starts to get tiresome, and ISP based email services will only accept a single email targetted at a limited number of people. You could make your software email everyone in small groups using bcc, but that could tie your computer and your internet computer up for hours - especially if the email is more than a few lines, or contains an attached PDF etc.

An email list on our server can send up to 1000 emails a day at no inconvenience to you at all. Techically we can easily send more than that, but we impose safeguards to prevent abuse of our system for spam. In the case where you can demonstrate a legitimate need, we can relax that limit.

Inter Office Email

We can secure email between your different offices.

Ordinary email transmits both your email texts and your email access passwords over the open internet. Anyone on the path to the email server can read your passwords and emails if they know how. Once they have your password, they can read your email as easily as you can. While there are probably more likely areas of security risk, for those with highly sensitive data they must transmit by email, this remains a worrying issue.

Email can be protected from snooping by using a framework for supporting strong encryption like PGP. There are typically some costs involved: PGP licenses for commercial purposes are not free and all users need their system set up with all the relevant keys, as well as the PGP software. We can help streamline this process for you by integrating PGP at the web mail level and providing a secure web connection.

PGP is free to use for non-commercial purposes, and we can help you with PGP if you want to use it - whether you are a commercial customer paying for your PGP licenses, or a home user using it for free.

We also offer an alternative to PGP: using an industry standard secure email connection protocol and S/MIME, your company email is well protected. This mechanism can't reliably protect emails sent to third parties across the internet, as we can't rely on the capabilities of the receiving machine. Encrypting your messages when you send them is the only way to be really secure if sending to people who aren't using our mail servers directly.