Using your account: Email Admin

Positive provides you with one of the most comprehensive and fully featured mail systems available. You have complete administratitive control over email sent to your domain name. This means you decide what happens to email sent to any address on your domain. Essentially, you have control over <anything>@yourdomain.com.

Because our system is so comprehensive and flexible, it is not quite as straightforward and simple as some other systems, please take a moment to read through this document and keep a copy for later reference.

Please note, we currently have two different mail systems in operation. Customers with accounts created prior to 1st December 2002 will usually be using a different mail administration system.  Details of this older admin system are available here.

Your email system is administered via a web interface. You can access this using your account login details by pointing a web browser to https://pop3.positive-internet.com/

More detailed support instructions will be added to this page soon, please e-mail support@positive-internet.com with any questions you have for now. The next page contains common questions and answers.

  1. I need all my email to go to a particular address (eg. a Freeserve account)
  2. Can I give my friend an email account on my domain that (s)he can check with his/her own password?
  3. Why can't I use your mail server or mail.mydomain.com to send outgoing messages?
  4. Which software will work with your mail server?
  5. How secure is this email system?
  6. Do I have to administer this via the web interface, or can I write a script of my own to make additions or removals to the system?
  7. There is a very large email in my account (or a users account) which is causing problems. Is there a way I can manually remove it from the server without having to download it over my modem?
  8. I would like to keep mail status flags syncronised between two locations so that I can check the same account from work and home, I think I need IMAP for this can you help?
  9. Do you do spam filtering?
  10. Can you scan my e-mail for viruses to help prevent my systems getting infected by mail received via your servers?

  1. I need all my email to go to a particular address (eg. a Freeserve account)

    In the main menu of the admin system choose "Email accounts". From there click on the link near the bottom of the page "Set remote catch all account". Now simply enter the remote e-mail address where you want mail to end up. Note that this only applies to addresses which don't exist as real accounts, so you may now want to delete all the other individual user accounts. You should not however delete the postmaster account as this is your administrator account.

    To forward your postmaster e-mail also to your remote account, you must choose "modify user" next to the postmaster account and enable a forward.

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  2. Can I give my friend an email account on my domain that (s)he can check with his/her own password?

    Yes. Simply set your friend up as a user, and point them at our email collection instructions to configure his / her email software.

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  3. Why can't I use your mail server or mail.mydomain.com to send outgoing messages?

    In order to save our server from possible 'spam' abuse (not necessarily from our own users) we have to restrict our service to picking up email only. Your CGI scripts running on our server can of course send out email, but you can't configure your email software to use our server to send email out. This is no great loss to you since you'll find your own Internet Service Provider's outgoing mail server to be faster and easier to use for your outgoing email, and the return email will come back to our server. We do offer an authenticated outgoing SMTP service for an additional 50 GBP + VAT per year.

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  4. Which software will work with your mail server?

    Any POP3 compliant mail software will work. There are dozens of freeware, shareware and commercial products that will work. All the major mail clients work, including Outlook Express, Outlook, Netscape Mail, Eudora and The Bat. You are bound to already have software which is compatible. Most email software these days is capable of dealing with multiple mail accounts from different mail servers, and most can also filter messages as they arrive into separate inboxes. However some email software can not cope with more than one POP3 account, so you may need to investigate alternative software or install more than one copy of your software configured in different ways. The most popular email client, Outlook Express, does allow multiple mail servers to be checked by setting up additional mail accounts in the Tools menu.

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  5. How secure is this email system?

    Like any secure system, the main weakness is in the password itself. Choose passwords which contain a mixture of letters and numbers, and even upper and lower case letters (passwords on our servers are case sensitive). You could even inlude punctuation marks for maximum security. Other than someone finding out or guessing a password, the mail system is extremely secure.

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  6. Do I have to administer this via the web interface, or can I write a script of my own to make additions or removals to the system?

    No, it is not possible since the mail server is running seperately from your shell account.  If you have any special requirement or script in mind, please e-mail support however, we may be able to add your script to our mail server for you in some circumstances.

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  7. There is a very large email in my account (or a users account) which is causing problems. Is there a way I can manually remove it from the server without having to download it over my modem?

    Please contact our support team on support@positive-internet.com who will be happy to assist with deleting any large files which may be causing problems.

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  8. I would like to keep mail status flags syncronised between two locations so that I can check the same account from work and home, I think I need IMAP for this can you help?

    We can certainly yes, we can IMAP enable any individual e-mail account for a small charge of 50 GBP + VAT per year per account. This enables the account to be checked from many locations with the status of read and unread mail kept syncronised. It has other benefits also, the mail is stored on our secure servers so that in the event of your mail client crashing or your laptop being stolen your e-mail is never lost. We also provide an enhanced web based reading system for IMAP users with extra features.

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  9. Do you do spam filtering?

    If your shared hosting account was set up after 1st December 2002 your mail will already be being scanned for indications of spam. The mail headers for mail you receive should include an X-Spam-Status line which is either set to Yes or No. This should make it easier to set up your mail client filters to detect spam once you have downloaded the e-mail, and nearly all mail clients will do this automatically once configured. We can also offer server-side filtering based on the same headers, which will move detected spam into a seperate mail box which you can review and delete at your leisure. This is more processor intensive for our servers so we make a per email address charge for this service.

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  10. Can you scan my e-mail for viruses to help prevent my systems getting infected by mail received via your servers?

    Yes, again, for accounts set up after 1st December 2002 this can be quickly and easily enabled on a per email address basis. For older accounts you will need to migrate your mail system to the new service in order to benefit from this option. please contact support@positive-internet.com for more information and prices.

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