Blind Carbon Copy
Etiquette
Filtering Tips
Setting up Your Email
Spam Prevention
Troubleshooting Email
Virus Prevention


Blind Carbon Copy

Using Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) allows you to send mail to several recipients without them knowing about each other. This is especially useful to send to small mailing lists for example. Even if you are simply mailing to a group of colleagues, it's usually advisable to put your email addresses in the BCC field instead of the To: or CC: field.

Etiquette

I strongly recommend all new internet users read one of these links!
I Will Follow Email Etiquette
Email Replies Email Etiquette
Dmoz Etiquette Links

Filtering tips

You may find it advantageous to filter your email for a variety of reasons. For example, you can setup filters in your favorite email client to sort out your mail from a specific newsgroup or from a specific person into its own folder. Here are some links to explain filtering for some of the popular email clients (you may need to search to find your specific version of the program or consult the onboard help files that come with it)
Netscape messenger
Outlook Express
Outlook
Eudora

Setting up email

The following tutorial may assist you in setting up your email account. It is written for Outlook express, but the same settings will apply no matter which email client you use.
Configuring Email Express

Spam prevention

Once you begin to receive large numbers of spam, it's nearly impossible to stop it. Basically, the longer you have an email address, the more likely you will be to get spam. The best thing you can do is to try to prevent getting it in the first place. Here are a few tips.
1. Keep a public and private email account. Your public one can always be discarded if you find you are getting too many spam messages. You would use this one to sign up for newsgroups, or any time you need to complete an online form where you are not 100% certain that your email won't be harvested for spamming purposes. (Look for privacy policies on this). The private one would only be used in your regular day to day correspondence with colleagues and friends etc.
2. Avoid posting your email address on your website. While this sounds impossible or inadvisable, there are ways that you can allow people to contact you via your website without the 'spambots' being able to pick up your email address. One way would to be to use a formmail script where your email address is hidden outside of your webpage. Another would be to use javascript to break apart your email address so that it isn't recognized as an email address except to people who wish to contact you. Click here for more information.
3. For those who are concerned with spam coming from the mining of the WHOIS databases, you might be interested in signing up at http://www.myprivacy.ca/ I have not used their service, but I think the company (EasyDNS) is quite reputable. I do caution you not to use a hotmail or yahoo address for your domain registrations though...unfortunately there have been cases where people 'forget' about them and they are deactivated. There are actually people who scour the WHOIS info for domains where the admin email account uses one of these types of addresses. It is then a simple matter of checking to see if the mail is invalid and if so, they simply register the email address and take control of the domain.
4. If you receive unwanted spam, do not reply to it even if it suggest doing so to 'unsubscribe' from it. Generally speaking, all this does is to confirm your email account as a valid email address and you get even more spam.
5. Ask us about measures that we can take to help you if you receive a lot of spam.  We do use a tool called Spamassassin which does not filter email, but tags the subject line so you can filter it with your email program.  We also have a service called Email Defense which does an excellent job of filtering email for both spam and viruses.  More about Email Defense can be found here.

Troubleshooting email

From time to time, you will no doubt have difficulties retrieving your emails. Here are some of them:
1. By far, the most common reason for this problem is that you have exceeded your disk space quota for your email. Generally, you are allocated 5MB of space for your email. If you think this may be the problem, please contact us.
2. Another problem that you might encounter is a connectivity issue between your ISP and our servers. When this happens, you may receive an error box saying there is a problem with your password. If you are not 100% sure of your password do not enter it in the hopes of getting your mail to work. If the problem continues for more than a few hours, you can either contact us or your ISP to see if there is a local issue. You can also do a traceroute to our server to see if there is a connection issue.
3. If you use any of Bell's or Sprint's internet services (i.e. Sympatico) you will not be able to use our outbound mail servers to send your mail. Instead, simply insert the settings they have provided to you in your SMTP mail settings.
4. If you do use our mailservers for outbound mail, you need to authenticate to our server before sending messages. This is easily achieved by simply checking for incoming messages first. If you seem to have problems sending out your mail and the error message mentions "relaying denied", then this is the problem. Contact us if you continue to have problems with this.

Virus prevention

We strongly suggest you use a reputable Virus protection software on your computer and keep it updated at least once weekly. For more information, visit our site. In addition, we will continue to look at ways to block them at the server level.