Frequently Asked Questions

Email accounts are used to receive incoming email to your domain.

To Create an Email Account

1. Log in to cPanel.
2. Find and click on the "Email Accounts" icon.
3. Click on the "Create" button.
4. Enter the user name of your desired email address.
5. Enter your desired password.
6. Click on the Optional Settings "Edit Settings" button.
7. Enter a suitable mailbox quota.
8. Set "Plus Addressing" as preferred - Choose "Do Not..." if unsure.
9. Click on the "Create" button.

Collecting Email

Once you have created an email account, any incoming email addressed to the account will be received and stored on your server waiting for your subsequent retrieval and removal.

As detailed in our standard hosting policies, clients are required to regularly collect and remove all email stored in all mailboxes. To enforce this policy, email items older than two months will be regularly purged from folders of all email accounts.

You can access your email either via your webmail interface or by collecting it via your local email programme. To configure your local email application, the values you need for an example email account of fred@your-domain.com are...

Sending Email

GCom Internet provides incoming SMTP services for your hosted domain, and also provides outgoing SMTP for low-level email items created at your server, either via your webmail interface or by other server based applications.

However, for sending email from locations external to your hosting server, such as your local email programme, you must always use an external SMTP server to handle all outgoing email items.

You will not be able to successfully send from a remote location if you set your SMTP server to your hosting server.

In most cases, you will find you can use your connecting ISP's SMTP for sending without any additional cost, or you can optionally create a free or paid account with a dedicated SMTP service provider such as...

www.smtp2go.com

Alternatively, if your connecting ISP does not provide you with a sending-enabled SMTP service which you can use with your own domain, and you do not wish to use a free or paid external SMTP service, you can purchase a high availability remote SMTP addon for your hosting account which is powered by the rock-solid Amazon SES infrastructure. For more information, please refer to our email relaying page at...

www.gcom.net.au/email-relaying.html

If you have purchased an SES Email Relaying addon, then you can send email from anywhere in the world using the following SMTP configuration...

Please note that GCom Internet does not provide support for issues related to the sending of email via third party SMTP servers.

Important

At the simplest level, email accounts and forwarders should be unique. You should not use the same name for an email account as for a forwarder unless you actually have a reason for doing so, and unless you fully understand the consequences of such a configuration.

It is important to remember that when an email account and forwarder exist for the same name, email sent to that address will be handled by both the email account and the forwarder. A copy will be stored on your server by virtue of the configured email account, and a copy will be sent to the configured target email address by virtue of the forwarder.

If you do create duplicate email accounts and forwarders for a special purpose, you must be sure to regularly empty the associated email account as required by our standard hosting policies. Otherwise, email items will remain on your server wasting your disk space. Once the space allocated to your email account is exhausted, no further email sent to the related email address will be accepted, and neither the email account nor the forwarder will receive the incoming item.

Although the duplication of accounts and forwarders can be an extremely useful tool when you need to send copies of email received by one user to another on-site user, you definitely need to carefully think about the email routing and storage which will result from your specific configuration.