All of LexiConn's webhosting packages include the ability to send and receive email at your domain name through a full-featured email system. You can choose to setup POP boxes on our servers or have email sent to your domain forwarded to an off-network email address that you have, eg. your_name@yahoo.com. In addition to creating POP boxes and email forwarding, you can also have the ability to configure email aliases. An alias is simply an email address that is redirected to an existing email account. For example, if you setup a POP box on your account named anthony and also want to receive email addressed to tony@your_domain.com, you do not need to create a separate POP box for tony - rather you can alias this address to the anthony POP box.

By default, each account is pre-configured with a catch-all alias. This alias will receive any messages sent to any address that is not handled by another alias. We highly recommend that you define all of your valid addresses, then disable the catch-all entry by editing the alias for the catch-all in the Account Manager by changing the goes to field to BOUNCE. This will send an email stating 'user unknown' to anyone who send messages to an invalid address. This setup will help you to cut down on your spam volume tremendously, since random addresses such as abc@your_domain.com, xxx@your_domain.com, etc. will no longer work. Choosing BOUNCE is ideal because it will let legitimate people know that your message has not been received and perhaps alert them to a typo they may have in the address.

Spammers often use fake from addresses when they send out their messages, which could lead to an influx of undelivered messages returned to you if you do not disable your catch-all entry. Your account and servers were not utilized in any fashion during the spam sending, rather a forged from address at your domain caused the problem. You would receive the bounced messages because they were undelivered, and appeared to have originated from your account. Think of it as someone writing your return address on an undelivered piece of postal mail; the post office will return the mail to you, even though you did not send it. Without having a catch-all entry in place, you will not receive these bounces to random addresses.

Another thing you can do to help combat spam is to subscribe to our spam/virus protection service. The virus service is updated each hour to keep current with all of the latest threats. The spam service uses a customized version of SpamAssassin, that has a Bayes theorem in place whereby the software "learns" over time. Essentially the more email you get, both legitimate and spam, the better the software will get at identifying spam messages. Each user has their own specific setting, including spam threshold, blacklist, whitelist, etc. Individual users can login to the Account Manager using their POP box username and password and only have access to change their own individual settings, as apposed to settings that affect the entire account.

To login to your account manager you may use the following link: https://www.lexiconn.com/clients/login.html

The spam/virus protection service is $5.00 per month for any shared account. This service only needs to be purchased once per account and covers all of the POP boxes on the account. This service can be requested at:

https://www.lexiconn.com/secure/add_spam.html

All accounts include a web based email program called webmail. While most people configure an email program such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail to check their email box, the webmail program can be extremely useful for people who would like to check their email while they are away from their usual computer. The webmail interface can be accessed from any computer that is connected to the internet. The URL for webmail is:

http://www.your_domain.com/webmail

The webmail inbox will show you all of the contents of your mailbox on the server. It will not show you email that you have already downloaded to your local computer. Any messages that you leave in the webmail inbox will be available for download via your regular mail client. YOuc an also store email messages in webmail by moving them to folders that you can create in the software.

Another feature of email accounts included with our service is the ability to have auto-responders. An auto-responded will send out a message of your choice every time someone emails the address you setup the auto-responded for. (ie. a vacation message or out of office reply) There is a section in the LexiConn knowledge base that provides step-by-step instructions on configuring autoresponders:

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