Offering quality web services at affordable prices.
**** Australian Owned and Operated ****
Thank you for choosing VCSWEB.COM as your Web host.
As well as hosting your WebPages, we also offer a full featured Email hosting
service, which works in conjunction with your website. This email hosting will
allow you to send and receive emails using your registered domain name.
It is important to realize that vcsweb.com is NOT an ‘ISP’ (Internet Service Provider). We are an ‘ICP’ (Internet Content Provider). This means that even though we host your website and emails associated with your domain name, we are not in any way responsible or related to the way you access the Internet itself.
The reason it is important to realize this is because when you signed up with your ISP for your internet access, they would have given you an ‘installation disk’ which would have automatically set up an email account for you so that you can send and receive emails via their servers. If they didn’t give you such a disk, they would have provided you with instructions on how to set this up ‘manually’ using the ‘Wizard’ that is a part of Microsoft’s Outlook Email Client.
YOU MUST NOT DELETE THE EXISTING EMAIL ACCOUNT.
It is essential this not be deleted because doing so will mean you will no
longer be able to receive Emails from your ISP. These Emails are to notify
you of important system changes, such as a change of billing charges, special
offers, account expiry reminders, and other matters that the ISP considers
it important for their customers to know.
Because you already have an Email account setup by/for your ISP, which should not be deleted, you will need to set up an additional Email account to send and receive emails associated with your domain name.
This is required because your ISP doesn’t ‘know’ about your website or the Emails hosted by VCSWEB.COM, and VCSWEB.COM doesn’t have any idea who your ISP is.
We have found that most people that have problems with Email setups do so because they are unaware of the need to have these two independent accounts. As such, they assume that emails to <yourdomain.com> will somehow find their way to their existing email account given to them by their ISP, OR, they will delete/modify the existing email account and then wonder why they are no longer getting potentially important emails from their ISP.
Unlike the Email address given to you by your ISP, now that you have your own domain name, you can assign your own Email addresses.
Example: If your domain name is ‘yourdomain.com’, you can have
sales@yourdomain.com
info@yourdomain.com
support@yourdomain.com
tom@yourdomain.com
dick@yourdomain.com
harry@yourdomain.com
You may have as many of these Email addresses as you wish, but for any to be in effect you need to contact us with a list of those that you wish to use. We require this so as to make your domain less susceptible to abuse. Some addresses are set up by default; we will detail these for you in the Email that we send after your account is set up. These can be changed by contacting us.
At this stage, it is important to realize that even though you can have many different email addresses, they will all go into a single ‘mailbox’, waiting for you to pick them up.
This is akin to having a PO box for your postal mail. It doesn’t make any difference if someone sends a letter to ‘John Smith. PO Box 123’ or ‘Jane Doe, PO Box 123’, in both cases the letters will both go to “PO BOX 123” awaiting collection.
An Email address is where Emails get sent TO, and Email Account is where you pick the Email up FROM.
When setting up Outlook Express to collect your mail from our servers, you have two choices to choose from, IMAP or POP3.
We recommend using IMAP as this option allows access to both your inbox AND your ‘spam’ folder. It also has several other advantages compared to POP3, such as allowing you to download the Email ‘headers’ only (To, From, Subject, Date/Time, Size). This equates to less time online before seeing what emails you have waiting for you, and it also gives you the ability to delete junk emails BEFORE wasting time downloading them.
POP3 will download the entire contents of your mail inbox to your computer in one fell swoop. This can result in a significant delay in the download time, and you’ll end up downloading many messages that you’ll simply be deleting immediately anyway (eg, Junk emails trying to sell you Rolex watches or various forms of medications that you probably have no interest in).
With POP3, the Email is usually deleted from the server after it has been downloaded. On the other hand, IMAP will keep a copy of your mail on the Server until you manually delete it. This effectively allows you to ‘store’ your emails on the vcsweb.com mail server, where it is safe from accidental deletion should you have a computer malfunction (vcsweb.com makes regular backups of all data to help ensure that we will never lose any of your stored emails).
Another disadvantage of Pop3 is that it only accesses your inbox folder. If you have other mail folders on the server (such as your spam folder) these are not seen by Pop3 and you must use other methods to access them (eg, IMAP or Webmail).
Since IMAP mail is stored on the server you can access it using other tools such as Web mail. You can also access other mail folders in your account. This makes IMAP so much more versatile than POP3, because among other things, it means you can access your mail when away from home without having to set up another Account in Outlook.
The main advantage of POP3, is its simplicity to setup. This is because as mentioned, it has no ‘concept’ of ‘folders’ and it doesn’t play nicely with other Email clients, such as webmail.
Can’t Decide?There is no reason why you can’t set up TWO new accounts, one using POP3, and the other using IMAP. Although a little more effort to setup, it will allow you to compare the difference between them, and this type of setup will allow you to have the best of two worlds, ie, POP3 will give you the familiar look and feel that you are currently used to, and IMAP will give you the added benefits of folders and web accessibility.
