You probably don’t use it to communicate with friends and family. But if you run a business, to keep in touch with its partners and customers, email is still the preferred medium of correspondence.
You always get reliable email service from public providers like Gmail and Yahoo. However, if you want people to take your business seriously, you need to have a branded email address.
It starts with a hosting account that can guarantee the smooth and reliable communication.
What is Email Hosting?
Most of you probably have @gmail.com or @outlook.com email inboxes. These work well for account registration and signing up for newsletters.
In a professional environment, free email providers don’t inspire much confidence.
If you don’t want to make a bad impression from the start, your organization must have its own registered domain and associated email address with it.
For this, you will need a good email hosting service. This service allows you to create and manage domain-based email accounts, configure forwarders, set up anti-spam filters, and control almost everything related to your company’s online communications.
At Softxaa, you can choose from three different email hosting plans. You can choose the plan of your choice based on your number of email accounts and storage needs.
The Email Startup plan: you’ll get 20GB of storage and 10 email inboxes associated with a single domain.
The Email Business plan: gives you 50 GB of storage and 25 email inboxes associated with up to 5 domains.
The Email Enterprise plan: gives you 80 GB of storage and 40 email inboxes associated with up to 10 domains.
Those of you who need even more email accounts please contact us.
Let’s first take a look at what you need to do after activating your email hosting plan.
Activating Your Email Hosting Plan
Our email startup, business, and enterprise plans are all based on a shared hosting environment, and their activation is instant. After you have completed the payment, your email hosting account will be created, and you will receive a welcome email with more information on what your next steps should be.
Your priority is to make sure emails are going to the right place, which means pointing your domain to the email server. If you purchased the domain from Softxaa along with your email hosting plan, it will be auto-configured. If you’re using an external domain, you’ll need to make some changes.
The welcome email contains the nameservers to point your domain so that it resolves to the email server. If for any reason, you don’t want to change the entire nameservers (for example, the domain is associated with a website hosted by another hosting provider), you can simply change the domain’s MX records. Again, all details are mentioned in your welcome email.
Creating Email Accounts with Softxaa HostPanel
Our email Startup, Business, and Enterprise solutions are managed with the help of Softxaa HostPanel, one of the most user-friendly web hosting control panels. Inside the welcome email, you will get all the necessary information to log into your Softxaa HostPanel.
If you’re just starting, your first task will be to create your mailboxes. This can be done through the Email Account tool in the Email section of the Softxaa HostPanel.
Accessing your email hosting control panel for the first time, you will only see the default email address. The default one is created to automatically capture all unrouted messages (e.g. emails that are addressed to invalid inboxes on your account). You can access or manage it using your default Softxaa HostPanel login credentials.
To set up a new domain-based email account, click on the Email accounts – Create button and follow the on-screen instructions. An information box on the right gives you information on how many inboxes you’ve already set up and how many you have left. The process of creating a new email account starts with assigning a username.
The username is part of the email address that precedes the “@” symbol. It can be up to 64 characters long and can contain letters, numbers, periods, hyphens, and special symbols.
Next, you need to look into the security of the new email account.
You can set a password yourself or let Softxaa HostPanel do it for you. With the Set Password Now option, you are responsible for securing your email account. You can create a strong password yourself, but you can relax that it will be more secure if you let HostPanel create it for you.
In the Storage Space section, you can define how much storage to allocate to each new mailbox. You can either distribute the available storage space evenly or set up some inboxes with more room than others.
There’s an unlimited option. If selected, emails will not stop arriving, no matter how large the email inbox is.
Note, however, that this may affect service to other users, and if you reach your hosting account’s storage capacity limit, the messages will begin to bounce back.
Then click on Create button completes the process.
The Email Accounts page gives you a list of all the inboxes you’ve created so far. Each of them has an action button next to it, through which you can check emails and later manage your email inbox.
The Connect Devices button gives you all the information to set up an email client.
Then you have the Change Password button, where you can change email account credentials, plus you can manage resource allocation and two-factor authentication.
Here you can also delete existing email accounts. Note, however, that the data will be permanently deleted, and you won’t be able to get it back.
Accessing Email Accounts via Webmail
The welcome email you receive with the activation of your email hosting plan does a pretty good job of explaining what you need to do to set up the popular email client on your device.
However, configuring the SMTP and IMAP/POP3 settings of an email client is not always practical. Imagine, for example, that you want to check your inbox from a friend’s computer…you can’t ask them to install and configure something like Outlook or Thunderbird just for that.
That’s why Softxaa HostPanel is equipped with webmail functionality that allows users to access their email through a web browser.
If your domain name is pointed to the email server, you will be able to access the webmail feature via yourdomain.com/webmail. If not, you can use the IP address in your welcome email.
After you enter the email account username and password, you will be asked to select a webmail client.
The Rainloop and Roundcube clients may differ in terms of the user interface, but they offer almost the same functionality.
Navigating through the user interface isn’t much different than navigating through your Gmail or Yahoo account. Still, with a dedicated email client, you get more features and are less likely to miss a new message.
Email Options and Settings
Softxaa HostPanel gives you lots of control over the domain-based email accounts you create, and that’s not just limited to changing passwords, managing disk quotas, or restricting incoming & outgoing communication.
For example, with the Forwarder tool, you can automatically forward incoming messages to individual accounts and discard emails and send an error message to the sender.
You have a lot of options when you set up an autoresponder. This includes setting the autoresponder’s start and end times, which emails they’re coming from, and even an optional delay between received emails and responses.
You can create custom filters and apply them to individual accounts or entire domains. Messages containing certain strings or phrases can be discarded or piped to an outside application.
Using the filter tool, you can decide how your email accounts will process Apache’s SpamAssassin flags as unsolicited.
To filter all suspicious emails, select Spam Status from the first drop-down menu, starting with the second one, and type “Yes” in the field below.
You can choose what happens to these messages from the Actions drop-down.
Conclusion
A reliable email hosting service is essential for any company. If you are running a business, you must ensure that all incoming and outgoing emails are delivered to the right place at the right time. Choosing an email hosting solution that guarantees it, can play a major role in maintaining a good relationship with your customers and partners.
