cPanel Email Features
cPanel contains many features that you can use to setup and configure email accounts for any domains that you might have attached to your shared cPanel website hosting account. Email is a growing form of electronic communication that has already replaced hand written letters as well as electronic faxes; this is because emails give you the ability to send any type of file you want as well as the ability to communicate standard text messages over the internet with ease, although the speed at which the message is sent depends on the speed of your internet connection as well as the size of the email that you are trying to send. cPanel provides you with options that you can use to setup your own spam filtering rules to ensure that you can keep out any spam you receive; normally custom spam filter rules are only available within dedicated server hosting environments, but cPanel allows you to set them up within a shared website hosting environment. Other options given also allow you to access the webmail interface for any email account that you have setup; this can be a helpful feature since it allows you to view the emails of an account without having to set the account up in a desktop email client such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. You are also able to setup auto-responders and email forwarders within cPanel. All these different options within cPanel allow you to set up the email for your domain just how you want it; some of the options given to you are fairly exclusive and make cPanel stand out as an industry leader since such options are normally only achievable if you are hosted in a dedicated hosting environment such as a VPS server or dedicated server. One thing to note is that you should always been careful when changing email options within any type of control panel since you can easily delete an email account, and any emails that it contains; if you incorrectly configure some options you could even end up stopping any email being received by any email accounts that you have hosted under your cPanel web hosting account.
With the use of this article you will be able to configure the email for your domain that is based on cPanel shared hosting with ease and with effect. By the end of this article you should be able to setup custom spam rules to help keep the worst of the spam out of the email inboxes that you have configured within cPanel; you will also be able to create email aliases which you can then use to forward email on to existent email addresses from non-existent email addresses. You will also be able to configure the MX entry for your domain that is contained within the DNS of your domain; this is only used in the situation where your email is going to be hosted either by yourself or by another web hosting or email hosting provider. Another thing that you’ll be able to do is setup custom mailing lists that you can then use to communicate with a large customer base. You will also be able to setup automatic response messages for email accounts that are configured within your cPanel shared hosting account; these messages will then be to the sender of any email that has been received by the specified address or addresses that you have configured automatic response messages for. You will be able to setup DomainKeys and SPF records for your domains through cPanel; these are needed to ensure that your email messages can be receive by people who are using free email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.
Email Accounts
The email accounts part of cPanel is the section that you can use to manage the email accounts for all your domains that you have hosted under your shared cPanel web hosting account; this panel gives you the ability to add, modify and delete email accounts for any of your domains. You are given the option to create and manage email accounts under any domain which you have attached to your hosting account. When setting up an email account in cPanel, you are given the ability to choose the domain you want it to be created under as well as the amount of disk space that you want the account to have to store email in; another configurable option given to you allows you to set the password for the account - if you are unable to think of a password at the time then you are able to use a cPanel function that will generate a random password for you that you can then use. In most cases, you are able to set up as many email accounts as you want within cPanel; however, you are theoretically limited in the number that you can set up by the amount of disk space that has been assigned to your web hosting account - the less space you have the less the number of email accounts that you can set up, you might also be limited by the specifications of your web hosting plan if you have chosen a low end one. You can also choose to manage the email accounts for individual domains and sub-domains that you have attached to your account via the use of the drop down option box that can be found in the top right hand corner of the email accounts panel. One thing to note is that when configuring email accounts, you should always be careful as to which options you decide to change or view; if you change information without realizing it then you could prevent users from being able to access their email inboxes, since you have modified the information that they use to login.
Webmail
A webmail interface is one that allows you to view your emails through a web browser without the need for a desktop email client such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozailla Thunderbird. Webmail clients are perfect for you if you are a worker who needs to check their email regularly, but spends a lot of time traveling between different locations; this is because you are able to access your email account from any internet connected computer - although the same is partially applicable to a desktop email client, you can only use one computer since the emails are downloaded and saved to the computer’s hard disk. cPanel gives you the choice to either use the Horde or SquirelMail webmail clients; you can’t choose to use one or the other - once logged into the the /webmail directory of your website, you are prompted to either use Horde or SquirrelMail and this process must be completed every time that you use cPanel webmail. You should not use webmail as a permenant solution for checking and writing emails since the features supplied in a standard webmail application are very limited when compared to those provided by a desktop email application. If you don’t like the webmail client that is provided with your shared cPanel website hosting then you can easily use a third party solution such as NeoMail; these solutions are normally pretty easy to install on any website but do require a certain level of technical knowledge since they normally involve the configuration of a database as well as the setting of file permissions to allow the webmail client to work properly. If you feel the need, you can also use a third party email solution - both free and premium products in this field are available; an example of a free product under this category would be Google Apps - with this you are able to set up your email accounts and then utilize the very well known GMail interface to read your emails, a premium product within this field would be shared Microsoft Exchange Server hosting that you would have to purchase from another web host in most circumstances. One thing to note when using webmail clients is that you should always be careful of what details you enter and what information you are sending since the computer that you are using may have a virus of sorts, or the connection that you are using may not be entirely secure.
BoxTrapper
BoxTrapper is a function within cPanel that makes senders (who are not on your ‘white list’) of emails to addresses that you have specified within your cPanel shared hosting account reply to a verification message; this type of practice is being put in place to help aid the fight against spam. The idea is that an auto-responder verification email is sent to anyone that sends an email to an email address that you have created within your cPanel account; the sender is then required to respond to the verification message with the email that they sent the first time - the email will then be properly delivered to the recipient user’s email inbox where they can read it. Since most spam email is sent from email addresses that don’t actually exist; in this case when the verification email is sent, it won’t be received by any email inbox meaning that there won’t be anyone to reply to it with the original spam message - this means that the spam that they sent first time will not be delivered to the inbox of the intended recipient. BoxTrapper can become quite an annoyance if you are permenantly communicating with people via email; this is because if you don’t choose for people who send email’s to you to be white listed after they have responded to the verification message and have been verified successfully, they have to respond to the verification message with the same email that they have just written every time they want to contact you via email. One thing to note is that when using BoxTrapper, you should always check your BoxTrapper queue regularly since it might contain emails which you were meant to receive, but didn’t since the sender didn’t respond to the verification email that was sent to them; this is a common occurence in spam email as well as emails that you might have received from online shops confirming an order that you have place with them.
SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin is a program that does what it says on the tin; it is used by many web hosts and by many companies within their email servers to help filter out any spam emails that are sent to email accounts that happen to be hosted on their email servers. SpamAssassin works in the way that it scans the headers and the body of incoming emails, then gives them a certain score that is known as a ‘Spam Score’ - the higher the score, the more likely the email is a spam one; all SpamAssassin servers have a ‘threshold’ rating which means that any emails that obtain a spam score above the threshold are automatically deleted or even rejected by the email server. Within cPanel you are given the ability to set your own threshold for all the domains that you may have hosted within your shared cPanel web hosting account; you are also able to choose whether or not emails that receive a spam score above the threshold are automatically deleted or not. You are also given advanced configuration options that allow you define email addresses for both your SpamAssassin black list and white list; these options should only be used if you know what you are doing since you could end up blocking emails from particular senders if you enter the details incorrectly. You should also make sure that the threshold score that you use is neither too low nor too high; if you use a score that is too low then you could end up restricting any email from being received into your email inbox, if you choose a high threshold then you could end up having your inbox filled with spam. One thing to note is that when you are configuring any type of spam protection service, you should always be careful and picky as to which options to configure; this is because that you could end up making the email server that receives email for all the domains that the server hosts reject any incoming mail, which could cause disruption for many people.
Email Forwarders
Email forwarders (sometimes known as mail aliases) are ‘virtual’ email addresses who forward any email that they receive to another email address, which can either be a virtual one or a real one. Forwarders are normally used in situations where mail piping is being used; this is when the email that is received by the alias is parsered by a script, and then added into a database in most cases - an example of this in action would be a ticket system since the emails are parsered by either a PHP or Perl scripts and then added to a database and assigned a ticket id. One thing to note is that email piping normally requires that the email server receiving the emails is hosted on the same server as the web server in order for the script to run. Email forwarders are also used in the situation where you want the emails of several different addresses to be forwarded to one real email address so that all the emails end up being in the same imbox; this is normally done in the situation where you are running several different companies but want the queries for say the support, billing and sales departments to be delivered to the three categorized email inboxes to ensure that there is no confusion, and so that many different email inboxes don’t have to be continually checked. One thing to note when using email forwarders is that you should always make sure that the email address that the emails are being forwarded to is correct, since you could end up forwarding all your private and confidential emails to someone else who just happens to hold the email address that your emails are being forwarded to; you should also make sure that if you are using a script to parser the emails, you enter the correct location and command to make sure that the emails are forwarded and parsered and not just dumped or rejected.
Auto-Responders
Auto-responders are messages that you define which are then sent to any person who sends you an email; the message is sent out each and every time to the sender of any email that you receive. Auto-responders should be used for example when you are not in your office, and won’t be able to check your email; auto-responders should also be deployed in other situations where you will not be near a computer for a certain amount of time meaning that you won’t be able to check your emails. Auto-responders should also be deployed in an environment where it would be a good idea if the sender of an email received some sort of receipt acknowledging the receipt of the mail; an example of this type of environment would include a help support desk for use by a company’s customers. The message that is contained within an auto-responder should only be a small one since the sender will not want to read a large auto-responder, but the information contained must be detailed as to avoid confusion; a message footer should also be attached to any auto-responder, although in most cases a legal denoting footer is attached to any outgoing emails - although this scenario is normally only appliable to a corporate email environment where the information being exchanged is confidential. You should try to avoid the use of auto-responders unless you absolutely have to use them; this is because if you end up having an email account which receives lots of emails, then it means that an auto responder is being sent out for every email you receive - this can easily put a strain on server resources, which is not something that your web host will take a liking to, especially within a shared web hosting environment. One thing to note when using auto-responders is that you should only use them to inform the sender of an email that you have received the email; you should not make the message too long since confusion can be easily caused if this is done.
Default E-Mail Address
The default email address (sometimes referred to as ‘catch all’) will receive any email that has been sent to your domain but the email address that the emails are intended for doesn’t exist, hence the term ‘catch all’ meaning that it catches all rampant email for your domain. Many experts and website hosts do not advise you to use catch all email accounts; this is because if an email attack is directed at your domain then the catch all account will receive all the emails although most will be intended for recipients that don’t even exist - this will put pressure on server resources and might even take the server down if the attack being aimed at your domain is big enough. Some web hosts don’t even allow the use of catch all email accounts since they recognize the risk that they can being to the uptime of the server; at the end of the day, web hosts want to keep their servers up and don’t want silly things such as catch all accounts affecting the performance of their servers since other customers will end up getting annoyed with the down time, and some might even decide to leave in search of another web host. A default email address is good for you if you run a small website which doesn’t receive many visitors, and you are the sole administrator of it; this is because you will not need to create any separate email account, and also means that you can give out any email address you want to people since the email for any email address under your domain will then be hauled into the catch all email account for your viewing. One thing to note when using default email addresses is that you should never use them with a website which receives a large amount of visitors; this is because since your website is very busy, spammers and hackers are more likely to want to take it down meaning that the risk of an email attack is greater, and if you use a catch all or default email account then the attack could really put a strain on server resources and end up taking the server down.
Mailing Lists
The mailing lists function that is built into cPanel allows you to create mailing lists within your shared cPanel website hosting environment. Mailing lists are mainly used to send newsletter out to a large number of people, or to communicate with a large customer base. By using a mailing list, you won’t have to enter all the email addresses of those that you need to communicate with through the list; in most cases this can help people save a lot of time. Using a mailing list can also make the process of sending a message to a large group of people easy; this is because all the details of the list are stored within your cPanel account, so all you have to do when you want to send the group an email is define the email’s subject, as well as the message that you want to send them. When creating a mailing list within cPanel, you are able define the list name as well as the domain name which you want emails from the list to be sent from; you will also be asked to provide a password that you can use to protect the subscription list to stop others that you don’t want signing up from signing up. cPanel as well as external mailing list applications such as PHPList allow you to add and manage multiple mailing lists; this can be helpful for you in the future if you intend to expand your mailing list offerings. One thing to note when using mailing lists within cPanel is that you have to manually add any recipients that you want yourself; if you want members of the general public who are visiting your website to sign up then you must use a PHP/MySQL based mailing list application such as PHPList to manage your mailing lists, however, external applications might not work within your shared web hosting environment since your web host might have applied policies such as mod_security which don’t allow some PHP based website applications to function properly, but this can be sorted easily through the use of the .htaccess file.
User Level Filtering
User level filtering is the name given to the option in cPanel which allows you to setup specific email filters for specific email accounts that you have setup under your cPanel shared website hosting. User level filtering is a helpful tool for you if you are finding that specific email accounts that you have setup are being targeted in individual ways; the user level filtering allows you to setup custom email filters which are specific to only the email account for which you have set them up. cPanel also gives you a test area within the control panel that allows you to test email messages to see how the filters that you have setup for individual email accounts will cope with them; this can be helpful for example if you think that the filters might end up blocking out important emails from other companies. User level filtering is a feature that should only be deployed on the basis that you think the spam emails that are reaching individual email accounts are being specially targeted at that account; this is because if you set the filters up incorrectly, you could end up stopping any email from received by the account that you have applied the filters to. Also, some filters that you set up might end up conflicting with the server side ones which have been set by your web host; this in itself could stop emails from being received and could cause you or the person that the email account belongs to a lot of stress and annoyance. One thing to note when setting user level filters is that you must be careful as to which filters you deploy, and how they are used; you should always use the test message feature after you have setup new filters since this feature will give you an insight into how the email message will be handled by the filter, and will point out any problems for you if there are any.
Account Level Filtering
Account level filtering is the name that is given to the process of setting up individual email filters for any accounts/domains that you have hosted within your shared cPanel website hosting account. The filters that you create within the account level filtering panel are unique to your shared cPanel website hosting account only, and none others that may be hosted on the same server as you. Like user level filtering, a test message panel is is provided; you can use this to ensure that the filters you setup handle email messages in the correct way. The filters that you setup within the account level filtering panel will be applied to any email account that you have hosted within your account; this means that when setting the filters up, you should make sure that they work with all the emails that the email accounts you have setup within your account receive. However, you should make sure that you setup the filters in a way that will still allow normal emails to come through, but still stop any spam in its way; spam is unharmful, but can be a great annoyance, especially if you receive large amounts of it - also, if spam is kept for too long it can start taking up disk space that you have assigned to your shared cPanel website hosting account. One thing to note when setting up account level filtering is that you should always make sure that you setup your filters correctly, if you don’t set them up correctly then they could stop some email accounts that you have setup under your account from receiving emails; you should always use the test email feature to see how the filters that you have setup will react to different email messages - this can ensure that there are no problems with receiving emails, and if there are any problems then they can be easily sorted and the necessary action can be taken to sort them out.
Email Delivery Route
This cPanel feature allows you to see how the server will handle the sending or receiving of a particular email message when a certain email address; this can be helpful when trying to locate a particular problem when emails aren’t being received by their intended recipients. The cPanel pane that displays this feature includes a legend so that you can make out at what points errors are being caused, as well as where email aliases are being hit; this legend can also help you find out whether an email box that you are trying to deliver to is a local one or not. Specific details including the IP addresses of the mail hosts that are being used to reach the intended email address are also displayed; this as well can aid in the process of finding out where a specific problem is taking place since you can then contact the owner of the host/server and ask them to sort the problem out. You can also use this feature just to see where your emails go when you send them, if you’re interested in that; this can help boost your knowledge if you are new to the concept of website hosting, and also if your web host asks to know the servers that your emails go through if you believe that there might be a problem at whatever level. One thing to note is that when using this feature, you should always read the legend first, and refer back to it if you are confused about something; this is because you think there might be some sort of error when in fact it might just be that the routing feature has hit an alias/forwarder file or that the email has actually reached its intended destination. If you are totally new to cPanel website hosting, then it is suggested that you don’t touch a feature as complicated as this because it could cause some confusion or mis-understanding; this is because you might not understand some of the terms that are displayed in the completed route.
MX Entry
The MX entry feature of cPanel allows you to setup another MX record for your domain as well as the one that is already setup and point to the web hosting on which you are hosted. MX stands for ‘mail exchanger’ and refers to the server or servers that you use under your domain name to allow email to be sent and received under it. This feature is helpful to you if you want to utilize a backup mail server that you might have, or if you want to move your email hosting away from your cPanel shared website hosting account to a third party email provider. The main purpose of this function is to allow you to choose where you want your domains email to be delivered to; this is something that many web hosts who use their own branded control panels do not allow you to do, since they want you to keep any form of hosting that you may have purchased from them, with them and restrict you from using any service with any other web host who you might have gone and purchased an email hosting service from for whatever reason. You should only change your MX entry if you have to, since if you change it to a server that doesn’t host the email for your domain then you could end up without the ability to receive email for any email accounts that you have setup under your domain in cPanel; also, you should only do it if you know what you are doing and have the technical ability to sort a problem out if one arises because you changed your MX entry. One thing to note when using the MX entry feature is that you should make sure that you point your domain to a mail server or mail servers that actually exist; failure to do so may result in you being unable to send and receive email under that domain until you have sorted the problems out.
Email Authentication
Email authentication is the name given to the process of user’s logging into their email account to check their email either through a webmail client or through a desktop email client; authentication is the process that is carried out to check that the user actually exists with the password that they have provided - if they have been authenticated then they are able to login. Email authentication is also the name given to how mail servers handle both incoming and outgoing emails; domain keys and SPF records are creatable through cPanel to make sure that emails from your domain are accepted by other email servers which you might be trying to send emails to. Domain keys are added to outgoing email messages under your domain name, and are used by the recipient email server to verify the source of the email; this can be useful since some email servers might not accept emails from your domain if they do not include domain keys within their headers. SPF records are TXT DNS records and contain the hosts that emails for your domain can be sent from; you should always use SPF records these days for any domain since free email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail will not accept email from domains where there is no SPF record - if they don’t reject any emails then they might either filter them through to the junk email folder. One thing to note when using email authentication settings is that you should always make sure you enter the correct details; if you enter incorrect details for domain keys then your emails could be rejected by other email servers since the source can’t be verified or the actual domain key included is incorrect, the same also applies to SPF records since if the record is incorrect then emails from your domain might end up being blocked by other email servers and services.
Conclusion
In conclusion, cPanel provides you with a number of different resources that you can use to check your email, protect it from spam and viruses as well as be given the ability to make sure that emails that are sent from your domain are accepted by other email servers that might otherwise reject your emails because of various reasons. With the use of user level and account level filtering you are able to make you that any email accounts that you have configured under your hosting account stay clear of spam; you can also use custom SpamAssassin rules to ensure that any spam that does get past your user and account level filters will be killed off and deleted by SpamAssassin. With the use of the MX entry feature you are also given the ability to move your email hosting away to a third party provider, but still retain your cPanel website hosting account so that you can keep your website running from cPanel; you can also use the MX entry feature to configure a backup email server for your domain, this means that if the primary server that your website is hosted on was to fail, there would still be another server where email for your domain could be delivered to meaning that you wouldn’t loose any emails even if there was a small amount of downtime. If your emails are being rejected by other email servers or by the servers of free email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, then you can use the email authentication feature that gives you access to domain keys and SPF record generators to ensure that your emails are accepted by all the email servers that you try to send emails to.
