Frequently Asked Questions

EW3D? What is that?

EW3D is short for Electronic World Wide Web Development.

You may have visited w3.org at some point in the past. This is the consortium which sets all official standards for the World Wide Web, www or 'W3'. Making use of this, we get 'E'lectronic 'W3' 'D'evelopment or EW3D.

Some additional thought went into it. You may see our favicon, the graphic just in front of the URL in your task bar. By rotating the E, we get the W and the 3. It does make a pretty neat graphic.

We hope this this bit of history about our domain name helps make it easier to remember, as we are not associated with any particular 'W'ater 'D'ispersant formula number '40' product.

About EW3D

Synergy at its best is not just a goal, but a way of doing business. EW3D.com has over 10 years of experience on the Internet. That might not seem like a long time, but not many people were on the World Wide Web back in 1994. Were you?

The Accommodations industry was an easy path in which to enter. Jeremy Robinson and his wife Diana, owned and operated a bed and breakfast. The online world was wide open back then and yes, the early birds did get some of the very best worms. It became obvious that the Internet was the place to concentrate the bulk of his inn's marketing.

Meanwhile, John Hinton was busy in the same small town using his computer for mostly graphics and language work. The Internet came along and suddenly his purpose seemed clear. A place to use those programming language and the graphics skills.

A partnership was born! We've moved from renting server space at a local ISP, to buying virtual hosting packages on distant machines, to putting in our first collocated server at another location. We are now in two locations with multiple servers running in each of those.

We are continuing our growth, with more servers added at our Goshen facility. We try (and thus far have succeeded) to stay one step ahead of where we needed to be. We run server-class hardware, not just PCs with server software on them. We order high-speed communications lines before we need them. This business philosophy has led us along a constant growth path….

And EW3D is committed to helping our clients grow along with us!

What email options are available?

EW3D.com has a variety of email options.

One option is to forward your email to a box which you might maintain at your Internet Service Provider, or to an online email system such as Google's gmail or Yahoo's Yahoo Mail. Forwarding simply sends the email to another email account. This was standard practice some years ago. However due to spam filtering by those providers, we can no longer forward to a few of those Internet providers. As of this writing, we can still forward email to Gmail and Yahoo accounts. (EW3D may need to decline the use of forwarding to some providers due to their blacklisting policies.)

We also provide email accounts which reside on our servers. These accounts can be accessed by our webmail system or by any of the popular email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird and even smart phones. There is no additional charge involved.

Accounts on our servers allow connections via IMAP or POP protocols.

When requesting a new email address, if it is to be forwarded to another provider, please include the email address you wish for your domain name and the email address it is to which to forward it. If it is an account on our server, please let us know that.

Why is my email stuck?

If your email client (Outlook is an email client) is 'stuck', just going in circles and not getting email or getting the same emails over and over, you more than likely have a corrupt or very large email on the server. Some spam messages have had malformed headers, which have given some email clients trouble.

To troubleshoot this issue, login to your account through the webmail interface. If you can successfully login to webmail and see your email, this verifies that your email is working properly on the server.

From the webmail interface, the troublesome email is generally the last one at the bottom of the last page. Webmail itself might take some time to load, as large emails or a lot of email, do take time to load.

If you are successful in logging in to webmail, and can see your email folders such as the Inbox, but get an error message instead of a list of messages, we will need to make corrections. Please contact us and provide the email address that is having issues.

How do I get to Webmail?

To get to webmail, go to:

You will need your email account username and password to login.

Why can I receive my email, but not send any?

There are two very different connections made for sending and receiving. Sending does have more restrictions for security and anti-spam reasons.

Our servers do require "authentication". Most email programs have a check box to turn this on. Also, be sure that the outgoing username and password is set the same as the incoming, which is working and in most programs, is held in two different locations.

Some service providers, the system you use to actually connect to the internet, block port 25 (again, due to anti-spam technologies). Port 25 has been the default port for sending mail for many years and most email programs set that as a default. The alternative 'standard' outgoing port is 587. This setting is normally in an 'Advanced' setting area of an email program.

Do be aware that the default port for incoming mail is 110 and should not normally be changed.

If this doesn't fix the problem, you could have a local firewall problem. Many of today's 'internet security' programs install firewalls without your even knowing it. Firewalls are good devices, but one does need to take a bit of time to learn its effects on your system.

Our Standard Spam Filtering

First there are a couple of statements about spam filtering.

1. All spam filters make mistakes.
2. There are no hard rules for spam filtering.

Our default level of spam filtering attempts to reduce the level of your spam to a point where 'human' mistakes are minimal. Yes, we have all gone to sleep at the delete key. We catch generally between 90-95% of your spam.

As for the first statement above. Each level of added spam filtering adds new mistakes or what is called a 'false positive', a good email flagged as spam. Again, we are trying to avoid these mistakes.

With regards to the second statement, one would think simple blocking based on spammy words would be flawless. We do have one example from a client who moved to us due to this type of filtering. Their previous provider had put a block on the 'F' word. Sounds reasonable. He later learned that this cost him around $5000.00 in sales! It turns out that some German last names contain that word. This person came by to visit asking why his email was not answered. It was then that after some research they figured out why.

Please read on about our filtering options in the FAQ.

Options for More Aggresive Spam Filtering

We do have more aggressive options available for spam filtering.
(If you would like additional filtering at the server level, just let us know)

We do have two additional levels of spam filtering. The downside to these are listed below.

First, additional filtering means more 'false positives' meaning you miss more good email.

Second, as most of our clients use POP accounts instead of Webmail or IMAP accounts, you do not see what is actually on the server. When we add additional email filtering we do create a 'Spam' folder on the server to hold these emails for a period of time. Very few people actually take the time to review these emails for mistakes. The potential for lost revenue is great. We must delete these messages automatically based on age, or the Spam box grows to an out of control state.

Note that if you set up your email program as an IMAP account, you can subscribe to see this Spam folder. Also, it is available from the Webmail interface.

A great solution

Most email clients/programs such as Outlook and Thunderbird have built in junk email filtering. These are based on one of the very best anti-spam technologies in use. After turning on these filters they do require training. That part is easy though, you just flag spam as junk or move the spam to the Junk Email folder. When you find mistakes, unflag it as Junk or move it to your Inbox. The email program creates what is called a bayesian filter based on the emails in the respective folders. This is a very smart filtering method which uses no 'hard' rules. It is much more intelligent than that.

The beauty to this system is that you the end user actually receives the email. If it is right there in your email program it is very easy to check and make corrections. The system gets smarter with time based on your personal preferences. For instance, some people may wish to receive email advertising ink jet cartridges, others may not. As time passes, this filtering improves requiring less work.

We feel that this is the best option for most of our clients.

Help! My Email Bounced.

When you receive a returned email, the first thing to do is read the bounce, reject or return message. Yes, often times this can be rather cryptic, but many times it tells you exactly what happened.

The error message might say permanent errors and something about the email address does not exist. If this is the case, then the email address you used most likely has a typo in it, or perhaps it is old and is no longer in service.

Sometimes it might contain other notices, such as your message it bigger than what is allowed on the receiving end. This is pretty common if you are sending images or other attachments.

It is possible that the error message will be from our system and contain helpful insight into why your email was not delivered.

If the message makes no sense to you and you wish to have us diagnose the issue, please send along a copy of that email to support@ew3d.com along with an explanation.

IMAP or POP, what should I use?

When setting up an email client, or the program you run on your computer such as Outlook or Thunderbird, you are presented with a choice of an IMAP account or a POP account. Which should you select?

IMAP leaves the email on the mail server and is just an interface which tells your email program to co-ordinate the email with what is on the mail server. The downside is the storage space needed on the server and it is generally a bit slower as it needs to check through all email on the server to find new email. It is important to keep your Inbox to a minimum size to reduce the quantities of emails which are checked.

POP, when using the standard setup, logs in to the server, downloads any new messages and then after that is complete, deletes them from the server. The email resides on your computer. It is fast as it is only reading the few messages that have come in since the last check and keeps the storage on the server to a minimum, or only the email that has come in since your last check.

The use of multiple devices has increased the use of IMAP. This is a technology where the device co-ordinates with the central email storage on the mail server. The device may be a main computer, a laptop, a netbook, a smart phone or any computer with webmail access. The email available to you is the same no matter which you use to check your email.

What about my (insert name of smart phone here)?

Smart phones, such as a Blackberry, iPhone, Droid, etc. use IMAP to connect to the mail server. IMAP is where email is left on the server until it is deleted by any in use. An email account should only be accessed using one protocol. POP stands for Post Office Protocal and IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. So, if you wish to use a smart phone to access your email, you need to be sure any other computers, laptops or netbooks are accessing your email using the same method. Using both is known to create issues with email accounts. This would be a case of you breaking your email which will require work on our end to make repairs.

We have many clients using their smart phones alongside of other devices with great success!

How do I set up my Smart Phone?

If you have an Android or iPhone, please see this page for screenshots and help with those devices.

Lets assume the following for this answer.

Your username: is johndoe.your_domain_name
Your domain name is : your_domain_name.com
Your email address is: info@your_domain_name.com

Fooling the Automated Set Up
First, all users on a server must have unique names. For this reason, we use aliases for email addresses. For instance, info@ is a commonly used email address but only one info user can exist. We can however tell the server to deliver mail sent to info@your_domain_name.com to the user johndoe.your_domain_name. So, many info@ email addresses can exist on one server handling email for many domain names.

With a 'standard' internet email setup, lets use Gmail for example, you can only have one unique username for each email account and they use username@gmail.com as the email address. So, lets say you wanted johndoe@gmail.com but that was already taken. You might need to use johndoe48294@gmail.com instead to have a unique username. Either way, both the username and the domain name are included in the email address.

When an automated program or 'Wizard' tries to set up your account on a hand held, if you input the email address info@your_domain_name.com, it will try to access your account on our server with the username info and the domain name your_domain_name.com. This is incorrect information as your username is not info but instead johndoe.your_domain_name.

To fool the automated setup, instead use your username@your_domain_name.com or from the example above, johndoe.your_domain_name@your_domain_name.com. The device will then be able to try various combinations to access the server via your_domain_name.com, which is right there in the email address, and then try to login using your username, or johndoe.your_domain_name which again is right there in the email address you provided. It will then need your password to complete the login.

So far, we are seeing great success with the automated programs getting it right when using this technique.

Enter the Right Information
You will need to have your email login information to begin the process. You will only need 4 things.

1. Your real domain name
2. Your username/login name
3. Your password
4. Your aliased email address

First, during setup, when it asks for your email address, use your_real_username@your_real_domain_name.com Enter your password when prompted.
After you have connected to your email with your device, then go back into the settings for the email account and then change the email address or from address to the email address you wish to use, such as our example email address, info@your_domain_name.com. This change will not change the other settings in your device, but only the from address when you send mail to others from your device.

Optional Email Services

EW3D’s optional email services have many advanced features. A few include:

• High availability redundant servers with email syncs/backups between servers.
• Generous storage space with scalability to multi-terabyte storage.
• Easy whitelisting and blacklisting for the user.
• Advanced spam filtering that learns from your actions.
• Email archiving.
• Under our advanced plan, full Calendar, Task and Contacts with the ability to sync between users and various devices, such as your mobile phone.

How to use the system

After requesting your account be set up by a tech at EW3D, the following will help you understand the system.

Although it is not imperative, best use of the system is under IMAP protocol, which is rapidly becoming the standard for email setup. IMAP syncs your email from the server to any device you have set up. This means your email is identical, perhaps on your desktop, your laptop, your tablet, your phone and maybe on a home computer.

The system works with all popular email programs, such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail and various smart phone email systems.

Use

• Access to the webmail system is via: webmail.yourdomainname.com
• Within that interface, you may review your spam and have the option to whitelist (make certain good email comes through) and blacklist (make sure these never get through) easily by selecting an email and using the pull down at the bottom of the page.
• Folders can be created either on your computer or within the webmail interface and they will automatically display on all of your connections.
• When using IMAP, it is a good idea to limit the number of messages in your Inbox. This helps speed up the connection. If you don’t want to delete older emails, we suggest creating and Archives folder and moving the messages into that folder.
• Spam training is easy. Always move spam into the Spam folder. Always move good email from the Spam folder to the Inbox. The system will read these folders to tune itself to your particular habits. For instance, some people might want those ink jet cartridge emails, others… not.

How can I Check the Status of My Domain Name, Such as the Expiration Date?

To check the status of your domain name, you use a tool called "Whois". This tool is available on many websites, in particular those sites which belong to registrars. I good place to check is the Network Solutions website and look for the 'Whois' tool.

What is a Registrar?

Some years back, all domain names were registered through Network Solutions, or the first 'registrar'. This was eventually opened up so that other companies could act as registrars. So, a registrar is a company who is approved to do the registration of domain names. In turn, they provide a connection to the service that announces to the world that your domain name exist.

What is DNS?

DNS or Domain Name Service in a nutshell, is the basic addressing used by the internet to convert a domain name to an IP address. The internet actually works using IP addresses, those number sets which look like 64.203.174.3. DNS acts sort of like the internet phone book, converting a person's name (domain name) to a phone number (IP address).

DNS is used for many things and is a very complex system. Not only is your website address affected by DNS but more importantly your Email service. We have found that the quality of DNS for various domains is rarely what is considered 'proper' or compliant to the RFC standards. Most email issues between servers are due to DNS problems.

If you would like to run a test on your DNS, visit http://dnsreport.com. This is a great tool for a 'first basic test' on the quality of your hosting service.