Web/Email Forwarding FAQ

Forwarding is the process of redirecting email from one address to another. We provide two levels of service: Our basic free service gives you get a single postmaster account which redirects all mail for your domain to a single email address. Our standard and advanced services have many additional facilities, one of which is being able to redirect email for individual recipients at your domain to other email addresses.

Like email, it is also possible to redirect requests for web pages. We provide two methods of redirection, standard and frame-based. Both have their merits.

No, not if you use our masked (frames based) redirection. You can see it in action from this url: http://www.grab-a-name.co.uk/ which simply redirects to our VirtualNames home page. Notice that the Title and URL stay the same when you click on any links.

1. Log in to the control panel. You will need the username and password you were allocated for this domain - these will have been sent in the confirmation email for the domain.
2. Go to the 'Change Website Settings' page
3. Select the domain you want to modify from the 'Web hosting settings for' drop down box
4. Set the 'Hosting type' to 'Redirect (standard)', or 'Redirect (masked)' if you have a forwarding account. Then click the 'Save' button.
5. Set the 'Redirect to' box to point at the URL (web address) of your site in the free webspace you have. Make sure you put the whole address including the 'http://' part. Then click the 'Save' button again.
6. If you have masked redirection you may also want to set the Site title, Meta keywords and description tags. These will help your site get indexed correctly by search engines. Remember, these tags come from our server and not from the site you redirect to.

This is a by-product of the frames based redirection, you can overcome this problem if you set the target attribute for the link to '_top'.

The postmaster recipient for your domain is the one that collects all mail that hasn't been set to go elsewhere and redirects it to your current email address. That doesn't mean that email has to be addressed to postmaster@yourdomain, it can be addressed to info@yourdomain, fred@yourdomain in fact anything@yourdomain!

If you have our basic free service (available with domain registration) you will probably only have a postmaster recipient. This means that all mail to your domain is redirected to another address. If you want sales@yourdomain to go to one place, and info@yourdomain to go somewhere else, for instance, you will need to upgrade to one of our forwarding accounts.

The differences apply to email handling only. Basic forwarding allows you redirect upto five recipients for your domain to different addresses. Advanced forwarding allows you to redirect many addresses, or store email in a POP3 mailbox and bypass your ISP's email completely. It also has other features, such as Web Email, autoresponders etc.

The main settings are:

1. Incoming mailserver is mail.ukservers.net
2. POP-3 port is 110 (POP-3 over SSL* port is 995)
3. IMAP port is 220 (IMAP over SSL* port is 993)
4. Outgoing mailserver is asmtp.ukservers.net
5. SMTP port is 25, 225 or 10025
6. In MS Outlook: Log on using secure password authentication must be unchecked.
7. In MS Outlook: My server requires authentication should be checked for outgoing mail

Also check that the username and password for the mailbox are working by testing them with webmail: http://webmail.ukservers.net/.

* POP-3 and IMAP over SSL does work but we currently do not offer technical support relating to problems with this

[ Click here to see screenshots with this answer. ]

Creating a mailbox on our servers

Firstly, you need to ensure you have created the mailbox in the control panel email settings page. To do this, click the Add button to add a new recipient, enter a recipient name, set the Enable Mailbox checkbox and enter a password.

Settings to read mail

When setting up your email client to use a POP3 mailbox, you need to use the following setting:

• Server name is mail.ukservers.net
• Port address is 110 (the default)
• Username is the name of the mailbox as shown by the control panel email screen
• Password is whatever you set as the password for that mailbox

Settings to send mail

You can also use our SMTP server for sending mail, providing you read your email from a mailbox and you have read your email upto 30 minutes before trying to send mail. The setting are:

• Server name is mail.ukservers.net
• Port address is 25 (the default)
• (We now also support SMTP on ports 10025 & 225, only use if your ISP filters port 25)

SMTP Authentication

If you have a mail client that allows SMTP Authentication (such as Microsoft Outlook, or Forte Agent) you can now use our Authenticated SMTP server to send mail, this is much easier to use as it removes the need to have read mail before sending. The details are:

• Server name is asmtp.ukservers.net
• Port address is 25, 225 or 10025

In Outlook, you will need to enable My server requires authentication and set the Authentication settings to Use same settings as incoming mailserver.

[ Click here to see screenshots with this answer. ]

This is purely a function of the mail client program you are using, for Microsoft Outlook Express the details are as follows:

1. From the Tools menu select Accounts...
2. Then select the mail account you are using (you probably only have one)
3. Click Properties.
4. Make the changes to the E-mail address and Reply address, and then click OK.

But It is possible that your ISP will not allow you to send mail through their servers unless the 'From' address is the address you have with them. If this is the case, you will probably get a '504' error when you try to send mail and your only choices are to: 1) Change ISP, or 2) Upgrade to Advanced Forwarding or Low Cost Hosting where you'll beable to send mail through our servers which do not restrict you in this way.

[ Click here to see screenshots with this answer. ]

Some ISPs filter your connection and route all port 25 (SMTP) traffic through their own SMTP servers, this means that you will be unable to use our SMTP server on port 25. To overcome this problem we also support SMTP on ports 225 & 10025. Please only use these ports for SMTP if your ISP is definitely known to filter port 25.

Details on setting your mail client to use a different port are beyond the scope of this FAQ, please consult the help files that come with your mail client.

We now also support smtp on port 225. This was necessary because new versions of Outlook will not allow you to set a port higher than 1023, thus making it impossible to set this value to 10025.

Our SMTP server uses POP before SMTP authentication. Which means you must access any of your mailboxes before you can send mail using our server. You must also be accessing the server from the same IP address, and within 30 minutes of reading your mail. Why? Well we have to implement this otherwise people could use our server as an open relay for sending spam, and it would be blacklisted by other servers.

New! We now support SMTP Authentication which eliminates the problems cause by POP before SMTP access, please click here for more information.

Hotmail has an option called "Inbox Protector", which redirects all mail not explicitly addresses to the mailbox address to a bulk email folder. If this is enabled, all your redirected email will also be redirected to this folder. You will need to turn this option off.