Giving our customers the best customer service is the goal of the whole team here at Flarehosting.com. This yellow shirt put a little more fun in the job yesterday.

The employee took all of the comments in stride and even wore a different Hawaiian shirt to work today.

Keep you work place fun and wear something outrageous today!!

Our mission is to provide the best service possible to our customers at an affordable price with two primary goals in mind: commitment and focus. We are committed to providing services that will not just keep our customers satisfied, but position them for success in web hosting.

Flarehosting.com

Step 1: Click on the Settings icon located on the main screen. Once in settings select “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”.

Step 2: Now select “Add Account”

Step 3: Now select which type of email account you would like to set up.  In this tutorial we will be setting up a “POP” account, so select “Other”.

Step 4: Now select “Add Mail Account”

Step 5: Here is where you would enter you email account information.

• Name: Your full name or the name of the email account.
• Address: Address is the full email address
• Password: Your password
• Description: should fill itself out but you can change that if you wish

Step 7: After a moment it will ask to enter the rest of your account information.  Select “POP” and now you are ready to enter you incoming (POP3) and outgoing mail server information (SMTP).

Step 8: Once you have entered the incoming mail server information (POP3), scroll down and you will then see where to enter the outgoing mail server information (SMTP)

Step 9: Once you have entered all the incoming (POP3) and outgoing mail server information (SMTP). Select save and now it will verify your POP account information.

Tips: If you receive the following error message, select “Yes” After selecting yes it will continue to verify, this verification process can take a bit so don’t be surprised if you find yourself waiting for a moment. This is normal by the way.

If you receive this error message, go back and check all your spelling and make sure the correct password is entered as well.

Step 10: Once the email account is verified the new account should be now listed in your “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” section. Select the new email account.

Your Done! Once selected just verify that where it says “Account” is “ON” and your all set to send and receive email.

Most hosting companies these days offer some sort of spam filtering included as part of its hosting services. About 3 years ago we started putting new customers on our Barracuda SPAM Firewall. For the first few months we didn’t really know what it could handle and slowly put more and more domains on it. Not all domains were added but instead only one every few new hosting plans we received. Then, in the spring of 2008, our network was slammed with what seemed like an endless barrage of directory harvest attacks across multiple mail servers. The mass amount of email hitting our mail servers practically brought them to a screaching halt. The mail queues on our servers were backed up with upwards to 200,000 messages in the queue when they normally only have about 200 messages waiting. We quickly started adding more domains to the spam filter that we had been hosting for a while and found it to be very effective at taking the load off our main mail servers. Although the attack on our network wasn’t removed by adding domains to the spam filter it provided us the ability to keep email functioning correctly while our network engineers and security team dug deeper into the attack. Today, all new domains are automatically, without a second thought, added to our spam filter and as we come across older domains that aren’t being filtered for spam we add them as well.

When my ISP at home decided to add spam filtering for my home email address to say I was upset would be a slight understatement. I feel I’m very tech saavy and can handle my own spam filtering through the Outlook Junk Email folder, software add-ons and my own mental discretion. My biggest fear was that legitimate email was going to be filtered out and I was never going to know it. As time went by, I realized how much easier it was to download only the half dozen worthy emails instead of the 200+ junk messages every day that I had to sift through. I’ve come to enjoy having the spam filter doing all the work and don’t worry about the one lost email I might miss each year.

I don’t think some customers quite realize how much spam they receive on a daily basis until they get the filter turned off for a day. I had a customer the other day ask to have their spam filter removed. Some of their messages were being tagged as a low scoring spam message and they found it frustrating. They decided having no filter was better. I recommended they keep the filter but instead we make some adjustments to how it’s being filtered. They insisted it needed to be removed and so I conceded. Within 3 hours they were begging to have it turned back on.

Although I gave them numbers in advance, warning them of the amount of spam they actually receive they needed to see it for themselves. Although I don’t think they really receive that much email for one domain on a daily basis, it turned out to be more than they wanted to handle. Their domain received on average 800 messages per day. Most of this all went to one mailbox. Out of those 800 messages, 750 of them were being filtered out as spam at the filter level. Of those 50 non-filtered messages about 40 were low scoring spam and were being tagged. What the customer saw was 80% of the messages getting through as being tagged as spam and therefore the filter wasn’t nearly effective enough. In all reality, it was quite effective and in actuality, the settings were just right so that it never filtered out legitimate messages but instead let only a small percentage of real spam through. After we turned the filter back on, we made some minor adjustments to fit their needs and now everything is perfect for them.

For the people that enjoy numbers and statistics, here are some raw numbers from our spam filter for today as of 10PM EST.

Number of messages FlareHosting received: 625,082
Number of messages considered spam: 569,377
Number of messages containing a virus: 1,388
Number of messages tagged as low scoring spam: 1,372
Number of messages filtered out due to “rate limiting”: 1,038
Number of good messages: 51,907

Percentage of messages filtered out: 91.7%
Percentage of messages that were not spam: 8.3%

Imagine receiving 10 times as much email each day, most of which being spam. How much time would you want to spend filtering it all out yourself?

There are a few basic checks you can do on the ports that your emails are sent through, but we’ll focus on one.   First, the most basic test is to check the connection to the port in the Command Prompt.  To get here, open your Windows ‘ Start Menu or select the Windows Key on your keyboard.  Go to “Run” which should be right above your “Start Button” in Windows.  Select “Run” and a box will open and type into the field “cmd” and OK or select your  Enter Key.    Wait for another box to open.  This will be the Command Prompt and it will be all black w/white letters.  It will say C:\Documents and Settings\yourname> and the cursor will be blinking.  Type in:

telnet mail.domain.com 25

…where mail.domain.com is your domain.  If everything is okay you will see something similar to  “220 mail.domain.com”.  If the port is blocked it will say “Cannot Connect”.

The protocol that runs over Port 25 is called SMTP.   So basically this port is being blocked by either the ISP or a firewall.  Again this is just a quick diagnostic test that you can run on your own and it gives you some general idea of what’s going on if your experiencing problems receiving your mail away from the office.

What should you do if Port 25 is being blocked?  The Internet Service Provider (ISP) is blocking this port and you will need to call them.  If you’re in a hotel room check with the front desk first to see if there is a firewall that’s blocking your port and if they don’t have one they should be able to direct you to their ISP for help if those ports can be changed.  If you’re at a hotspot/restaurant you’ll need to move to another hotspot that isn’t blocking port 25.  Good luck, because getting the port changed at one of these spots is unlikely.   If you are getting this error it’s the ISP you need to contact, it’ll be easier to find another hotspot. Your support team cannot fix the issue, they can only inform you to contact your ISP to make these changes.