It’s been a while since we last provided an update about our anti-spam platform back at the beginning of February. Since then you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s all been a bit quiet on spam front, but rest assured we’ve definitely not been been resting on our laurels. Over the last two months our developers and network engineers have been busy beavering away at the configuration, code and script changes that will allow us to introduce the functionality promised when we last blogged about the subject.
Following on from some hints in the end of day posts we are now ready to launch some more improvements to the Manage My Mail tool. The changes will be made tomorrow morning.
The idea behind this is to allow you, the customers, to add new address without having to understand the difference behind a mailbox, redirect or alias.
After some user testing it was decided the easiest way to achieve this goal was to introduce a wizard. The choices you make going through the wizard will automatically create the correct type of email address and then take you to a confirmation screen with any details you may need.
The first screen you see when logging in to the Manage My Mail area will now be a summary of all the email addresses you currently have, similar to this:-
Click the image for a clearer view of the page.
This should make it easier to control your existing addresses as well as create new ones.
Hopefully this will make your life easier when using our email system.
Thanks for reading.
Chris
This is intended to be a guide on how to use the Manage My Mail tool to effectively cut down the amount of spam being received into your mailboxes. I have based it on the way I use the tool to deal with spam which has proven to be very effective.
We do have a support page on how to use this too, you can find this here
First of all I’ll show you where the tool can be found.
Simply browse to the member centre at http://portal.plus.net and log in.
Once you are logged in click the link to Email Settings and you will see a screen similar to this:-
(click image to expand)
You should then click on the Manage My Mail icon.
This will take you to the first page of the Manage My Mail tool which allows you to add, edit or remove mailboxes from your account.
If you are finding that email is coming to your default mailbox then I recommend renaming this, click the ‘rename’ link if you want to do this.
(click image to expand)
Personally I renamed my default mailbox to ‘Chris’, you can obviously choose whatever you wish to use.
Once you have done this you may want to turn off the ‘catch-all’ feature of this mailbox if this is not already done on your account.
This will stop people being able to send emails to anything@username.plus.com and means they will only be able to use the specific mailboxes, redirects or aliases you have set up. (We’ll get on to aliases later on)
Click the tab labelled ‘catch-all’ and it will take you to this screen:-
(click image to expand)
Change the status in the drop-down box to ‘off’ and press submit.
When I did this on my account it stopped about 70% of the spam without taking any further measures.
The next thing I would do is register the free .co.uk domain we are offering customers affected by the spam problem. If you have already registered it then you can skip this step.
Stay logged in to the member centre but click the ‘Domain Names’ link on the left, this will take you to a screen like this:-
(click image to expand)
Click the button and this will take you through the process to register a free .co.uk, .me.uk or .org.uk domain name. If you try to register a domain with a different extension then you will get charged at the normal rates for this.
Once you have registered the domain you can now alter the spam settings on an individual domain basis. Click on the spam tab and you will be taken to a page with a drop down box of all your domains, you can change the settings per individual domain or on all your domains by clicking the relevant checkbox.
(click image to expand)
Once this is registered then you can use this for your emails. To ensure that you are only going to receive emails to your new domain and not to mailbox@username.plus.com then you need to raise a ticket to request us to turn emails to username.plus.com off. Again when I did this it eliminated all but 1 or 2 spam every few days to my mailbox.
To deal with these final few spam messages you may want to have anything marked as [-SPAM-] deleted automatically or delivered to an IMAP folder at http://webmail.plus.net so you can check through them before deleting any messages. They will then be removed from here after 21 days.
The final step I take is to ensure I know exactly what email address I have given to different people and companies.
For friends and family I give them the chris@domain.co.uk address, however if I need to use an email address to sign up to something I tailor the address to match the company.
For example if I am signing up for eBay I set up an alias or redirect for ebay@domain.co.uk to arrive in my normal mailbox. I can then see where my emails are arriving from, if I do start getting spam then I know where it’s coming from.
To set up aliases once again you need to visit the Manage My Mail tool.
Click the Aliases tab and you will be greeted with this screen:-
(click image to expand)
As you can see there is already an alias set up on here to receive emails from PlusNet. I also want to set up an ebay alias so I click on the Add New Alias button.
Enter the name of the new alias and select the mailbox you want to point this to, I have used an alias name of ebay and pointed this to my chris mailbox.
(click image to expand)
This means that any emails sent to ebay@domain.co.uk will be received into the same place as chris@domain.co.uk.
These steps proved very effective for me, hopefully they will for you too.
Chris Parr
PlusNet Comms Team
Following on from the webmail incident PlusNet have added more functionality to the Manage My Mail tool.
These features are:-
- Customers can now set up a redirect to automatically blackhole an address using the redirect option
- Mailbox names can now be 1 character long, previously the minimum was 2 characters
- Increased search functionality on mailboxes and redirects, this will make it easier to find a specific mailbox
- Redirects can now be edited without losing the search/sort options currently in use
- When a mailbox is deleted customers are now warned that any associated aliases will be removed
- There is now a link back to the customer portal from webmail
- The attachment size allowed in webmail has been increased from 2MB to 7MB
These activities are additional features to go alongside the deliverables in the Webmail Incident Report
There are still more ideas and features in the pipeline and we will update you as we have more information.
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
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