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EW3D.com E-mail System
by John Hinton webmaster@ew3d.com
E-mail is the heartbeat of your online enterprise. Almost everything
else you do is mute if e-mail is not functioning at its prime. This
article provides information and help to explain the netizen terms
used with e-mail and tips to help you get the most from your e-mail
system on EW3D.com.
E-mail and DNS
The delivery of e-mail is much the same as the delivery
of your web pages. The basic difference is e-mail is sent to a requested
address, whereas a web page is called from a requested address.
Both heavily rely on the domain name system or DNS. Therefore, it
is very important that your host provides proper nameservices for
your domain. EW3D.com does this by maintaining three nameservers
and proper reverse DNS lookups. What does this mean? First, DNS
is the system by which your domain name is converted into an IP
address. The domain name really means nothing to the internet network.
All email and websites are found by the IP address. The domain name
location, the IP address, is then broadcast out onto the net and
this information is held by the major nameservers in the world,
about 14 or 16 servers. Local nameservers send along a time to live
(TTL) with the domain records and those nameservers let those records
expire at that time and check for existing records again on the
originating nameserver and the process starts all over again. These
TTLs are all important, too short or too long are both troublesome
to the system and cause various issues. Also, many mailservers have
started checking to see if a domain really exist before receiving
mail. This is done by what is called reverse DNS lookup. We have
not yet implimented this feature as there are simply too many domains
out there with improper DNS and no reverse DNS. You would not get
mail from these systems. We do expect to enable this feature as
it becomes more of a standard and those with improper DNS are forced
to make improvements. All of the EW3D.com mailservers have proper
DNS and reverse DNS. We also maintain proper DNS for all of our
hosted domains. The bottom line... E-mail is heavily reliant on
proper DNS.
The EW3D.com Mailservers
EW3D.com maintains two mailservers for our clients. In
the DNS records, these mailservers are listed with priorities numbers.
We set the first mailserver to be the one where your email account
exist. If for any reason that primary mailserver is not reachable,
the mail is then sent to our secondary mailserver. It is set to
receive mail for your domain, but it has no mailboxes for your account.
It then queues your email, polling the primary mailserver for up
to 5 days and when available it sends the mail back to the primary
mailserver which then delivers it to your mailbox. A secondary mailserver
greatly reduces the number of "message not deliverable.. will
keep trying for 5 days" messages your potential customers might
see. This provides you with a more professional presense on the
net.
Stuck E-mail Client
We have heard a lot of reports from both our users and
from several of our local ISPs that some e-mail clients get 'stuck'
while trying to download a message. The problem seems to lie with
spammers' attempts to beat filters. How many times have you seen
Viagra spelled properly lately? Well, it goes beyond that. Many
headers have excessively long subject lines, odd charactors in addresses
and break about every rule in the book. Sometimes they shoot themselves
in the foot with an e-mail which can't be downloaded or viewed.
In fact, as long as that email is on the system, you can't download
anymore mail!
For our POP account clients, we have provided
two ways to get to your e-mail through a web interface. One is through
the 'Webmin Control Panel' (link is on the right within this user
area) and the other is via 'Webmail'. Webmail will
likely be the easiest to remember and can be used for many more
purposes. If you are on vacation or even just out for the day, you
can simply go to http://webmail.yourdomain.tdl (no www.) and login
with your username and password to access your e-mail via the IMAP
system. Scroll down to the bottom, delete the spam, and then you
will at that point likely be able to start downloading via your
local client again.
Note that when using Webmail, any e-mail left on the server (not
deleted) will be available for download to your regular e-mail client
once you return home. Webmail will also keep an address book, view
attachments, send mail and is full of nice features. Do note, mail
left on the server does count toward your disk quotas. Be sure to
keep a clean house.
Our Anti-virus System
The EW3D.com mailservers are set to reject all mail with attachments
which are Windows executables. What is a Windows executable? These
are files that are opened directly by the operating system and not
by another application. Those file types include .exe, .cmd, .scr,
.com, .pif and so on. We allow .jpg, .gif, .pdf, .zip, .doc and
file types opened by other applications. We suggest that our users
all turn on 'file extension' within their operating system. You
do this on Windows systems by opening 'My Computer', selecting 'Tools'
and then 'Folder Options'. Choose the 'View' tab, scroll down and
uncheck 'Hide file extensions for known file types'. This will provide
you with extra information when you receive an email with an attachment.
The virus writers are getting very crafty! For instance, they might
send out an attachment with the name 'a_very_interesting_file_name.pdf.pif'.
With file extensions turned off, you see that it is a .pdf file
and think it is safe. What you don't see is it is a .pif (progam
information file) and Windows will run this automatically. Suddenly
you have a virus. EW3D.com has been looking at the ClamAV product
which is getting very high ratings. We will likely switch to or
add this system. Up until lately .zip files have been fairly safe.
The last few viruses coming along have used .zip files as a delivery
method. Therefore, our system has a bit of a flaw in it now. The
beauty of our system is that it does block many viruses before they
are written. The default to block these filetypes blocks future
viruses. Anti-virus software must first be updated before it can
detect and block viruses. So, the virus is sent out. Someone gets
it. The AV community then gets a copy. A signature is written. That
signature then has to be downloaded onto the protecting machine.
This does take at least some hours if not a day or more. With the
speed of delivery these day, hours might be too long. It's a version
of Russian Roulette. Simply put... Don't ever download attachments!
Even Word and Excel files can contain viruses in macro form. They
are not safe either.
Selecting E-mail Addresses
Not too many years ago spam wasn't so bad. Many of our users opted
for a simple aliasing technique where anyname@yourdomain.tdl was
forwarded to your email address or POP account. Now, for many, that
was a mouthful of technobabble. Aliasing? It's
really pretty simple. You choose an alias name, attach it to your
domain name, such as alias@yourdomain.tld and that's all there is
to it. You own the domain name. You can choose whatever name or
names you want to use. Forwarding? These aliases
mean nothing with regards to where an e-mail is ultimately stored.
Each alias must be forwarded to an e-mail account which you can
access. Either your personal e-mail address which you use with your
local service provider (dial-up, cable-modem, ISDN or DSL account)
or a POP or IMAP account on the EW3D.com server. Hmmm, I think I
dug a bit more of a hole there? POP? That stands
for 'Post Office Protocol'. This is simply a delivery method whereby
you set your e-mail client (a program running on your local machine
such as Outlook, Netscape, Eudora or Mozilla) to download the messages
off of the server and onto your local machine. IMAP?
IMAP stands for 'Internet Message Access Protocol'. The email is
accessed directly from our server and left there until you delete
it or download it via your client. The username used with the password
to access your mail is also a 'good' email address. It will work
as your_username@ew3d.com. For this reason, we suggest using usernames
that aren't common names like John or Debbie. E-mail address miners
will quickly have you in their databases. So, when you want an e-mail
address like steve@mydomain.com and we set up a POP account for
you, this is the reason we don't normally use 'steve' as the username
on our system. It's simply too easy to target. You'll get enough
spam to steve@yourdomain.tld without getting all the steve@EW3D.com
system mail as well.
Meanwhile.. back to the beginning. As I said before, many of our
users simply chose to have any_name_entered@theirdomain.tld forwarded
to their personal or POP email address. E-mail address miners
have made this a bad practice. Everyday we see tens of thousands
of attempts to 'mine' e-mail addresses on our servers (yes, we do
block many of these abusers). They will send email out to a list
of names, maybe 20 to 50 per day and just roll alphabetically through
their list of names recording those that are not returned. The data
generated from these attempts is then sold to spammers. We feel
it is now very important to select only the email 'aliases' that
you use, which will make the others bounce.
A side note to this issue. There are RFC standards written for
the internet. A few important ones that apply to e-mail are:
- Domains should accept mail to abuse@domainname.tld
- Domains should accept mail to postmaster@domainname.tld
- Domains should accept mail to domain literals, as in IP address
(we do that for you)
It is a good idea to include webmaster@yourdomain.tld which is not
a standard. Unfortunately all of these addresses are spam traps. However,
as anti-spam systems are put into place within mailserver software.
I would not be surprised if a check of one of the above addresses
was made on the domain before mail was received from that domain.
The technology is there. I predict it will be one of the next new
standards. Spammers don't receive mail. It would simply bog down their
systems with incoming bandwidth use. Forcing these receipt checks
would increase their costs and force them into proper mail etiquette.
If these checks become a standard, we will announce these findings
to all of our users.
Setting your own e-mail aliases is not a hard
task. First you go to either yourdomain.tld:10000 and login with
your username and password. From the right menu, select 'Access
Your Control Panel'. Simply click through the security warning
(you may want to check the 'Don't show this warning in the future.'
box. Then select 'Server' from the left column. Then select 'Virtual
Email' and click the 'Mail Aliases' icon. Select the 'Add an alias
to this domain' line or choose an existing mailbox to edit. Carefully
read the entry form. The first box at the top is for the alias you
wish to use. If you want to use info@yourdomain.tld, simply enter
info into the box next to 'mailbox'. Be sure the radio button is
selected next to this box and not to the left of 'All mailboxes'.
Selecting 'All mailboxes' will send every_name@yourdomain.tld to
you. Some may wish to choose this option at least from the start,
so that you may decide as you go what e-mail aliases you want to
use. Then after a period of time, as spam increases you may want
to go back and select particular e-mail aliases. Next, you have
to tell our mailserver where to forward this mail too. If you want
it forwarded to your local ISP, in the top pull down select 'Email
Address'. To the right of that enter your entire e-mail address,
such as myusername@my_local_ISP.tld. If you want the mail for this
alias to go to more than one mailbox, you can enter more in the
other two boxes. If you want this alias forwarded to your EW3D.com
POP account, select 'Mailbox of User' from the pull down and in
the box to the right enter your EW3D.com username. Do not use the
@ew3d.com in this entry, but only your username. Click the create
button and that alias is written. It is a very good idea to test
your new e-mail settings just to be sure you got everything right.
From your local account, send an e-mail to your new alias@yourdomain.tld
address.
Anti-spam
Oh what a can of worms! At present, EW3D.com believes there are
no available system wide anti-spam systems that are trustable. Our
users have voiced loudly that they want to get their mail and would
rather get 500 spams and the one order, than to miss that one order.
Everyone has different likes and dislikes as well. Some people want
to get inkjet cartridge advertisements. I've seen many business
related e-mails returned due to 'dumb' spam filtering. One, a potential
sale of nearly a half million dollars. Others a room for a night
or two. All caught and returned due to a simple term in the e-mail
which matched a 'spammy term'. We have been beta testing a bayesian
filter where each user keeps their own database and trains it to
their liking. I can tell you this has great promise. After my initial
training period of about 2000 e-mails, I did not have a single 'false
positive' (a good e-mail filed as spam) for 6 months. I receive
around 2000 to 3000 e-mails a day and I was having delived to my
inbox about 5 to 10 spams a day. I'm highly impressed with this
system. All mail is still delivered and is there for your inspection.
The downsides to this system are it requires a lot of disk space
(an average of 100 megs) and requires a good bit of processing power.
This system is also not an easy one to setup on your local client
as it requires the creation of both a EW3D.com POP account and IMAP
account. We will be providing complete instructions for installation
for Netscape, Mozilla and Thunderbird. We have tried to create help
files for Outlook and Outlook Express, but have found that each
version seems to change the names of the buttons and location of
setup boxes. We would be required to maintain at minimum three different
Windows Operating Systems on four different machines each with a
separate version of Outlook and Outlook Express on each machine.
We do feel that those who are savvy with their email client will
be able to follow the online guide for Netscape to immulate the
setup within whatever client they use. We will announce this system
when it is deemed ready. We will have a $60 per year additional
fee for signup.
Our Goal
Delivering your e-mail! We do block the IP addresses and/or domain
names of some well know spammers. We also do block the IP addresses
of some e-mail miners. We block Windows executable attachments.
We deliver all the rest. It is our goal to first and foremost see
to it that you get your orders and sales. We will slowly and carefully
add features which help reduce the spam problem and then only those
which we feel absolutely sure about.
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