Elirion uses the mail server that comes with the web hosting control panel that runs the server (ISPConfig) to provide email services for our hosting and access customers. The mail server works with all popular desktop and smart phone email programs. Many of our customers prefer to use web mail, and use either our web mail (there's a link to web mail from our home page) or one of the popular web mail programs like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. You can set up email accounts that forward your mail to Gmail, Yahoo!, or one of the other providers. You can also set up these providers to pull email off of our mail server and mix it in with your other accounts.
If you are a hosting customer you have a web mail interface at https://www.elirion.net/roundcubemail
The web mail program also lets you pull in email from other mail servers and mix it all together.
If you prefer using a desktop email program like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook, or a smart phone email app, it's easy to set up a mail account to access your mail on the Elirion mail server.
As you work through setup, you'll be asked for this information:
- Account type: POP or IMAP
You can use either. POP is a simple method of pulling mail off the mail server into the local program, but POP can leave the mail on the server so you can read it from several devices. IMAP keeps mail on the server in folders, and it better for sharing email between devices or even between several people. We recommend using IMAP. - Display name: type in your name as you want it to appear as the sender of the email. You might choose to use a nickname, or an alias, depending on how you intend to use your email account.
- Email address: type in your email address. If you have a hosting account, you will have set up this email account in ISPConfig.
- User name: this is the same as your email address.
- Password: type in the password you entered when you created the account. We recommend using passwords of at least 8 characters and containing upper and lower case letters, digits, and punctuation characters.
- Incoming mail server: mail.<domain>.<tld>, so if your web site is example.com, use mail.example.com - or use mail.elirion.net
- Outgoing mail server: mail.<domain>.<tld>, so if your web site is example.com, use mail.example.com - or use mail.elirion.net
- Outgoing mail server port number: 587
Ths is the "road warrior" port number used to access corporate mail servers from anywhere. Email programs often default to using port 25, but many ISPs force port 25 to go to their mail servers in order to prevent their users sending spam.
If you're having trouble getting this to work, give us a call.
Tips:
- The most common problem was forgetting to use a complete email address as the user name. For example, using "alan" instead of "alan@elirion.net"
- You can check your user name and password by logging into your web mail with the same credentials
- The outgoing port number is set on advanced settings or security settings pages in some email programs
- The mail server presents your mail program with an SSL certificate that says it's *.elirion.net, which doesn't match the incoming or outgoing server names for hosting customers. This causes the program to report an SSL server mismatch when you tell it to use a secure connection. You can often tell the mail program to never warn you about that again. You can also use mail.elirion.net and smtp.elirion.net as the incoming and outgoing mail server names. (This doesn't work if your web site is on a different server than mail.elirion.net.)
- Send yourself a test email. You can send one to yourself from web mail to test the ability to receive email. You can send yourself one from your mail program to test the ability to send from that program.
