email

If your email lives on our servers, here’s how to get at it. In the examples below you can substitute mail.yourdomain.com for mail.spanner.org, but if you use the spanner addresses you will encounter fewer messages complaining about server certificates and that sort of thing.

Receiving mail

Each email program asks a different set of questions – see below for a few specifics – but they all want essentially the same information:

• account type: IMAP is recommended.
• incoming mail server: mail.spanner.org
• authentication: password
• username: your full email address
• password: your password
• use SSL: yes if you like

Sending mail

Normally – for a moored computer, anyway – you’ll have better results using your ISP’s mail sender (aka the SMTP relay) but if you prefer, you can also use our mailservers to send mail out. For mobile people this is probably the best route. The settings are very similar:

• outgoing or SMTP server: mail.spanner.org
• server requires authentication: yes
• username: your full email address
• password: your password
• use SSL: yes if you like

Some ISPs – eg Orange – block access to smtp servers other than their own. If you get error messages on sending – from your computer, not in the form of bounced messages – and everything else looks right, that’s probably why. In that case you can tell your mailer to use port 587 (aka ‘submission’) instead of port 25 (‘smtp’).

webmail

…is at mail.spanner.org/roundcube. Your login is as usual the full email address – someone@somewhere.com – and the password you were presumably given when the email account was set up.

• If you get a blank screen the first time you log in, just hit reload.
• If you get an error when you try and send a message, it’s probably because you need to create at least one identity: click on settings and then on the ‘identities’ tab.

Mailboxes and directories

If you’re using IMAP you should be able to create mailboxes within your account here and file messages in whatever way you like.

Notes for Apple Mail

• Mail is good at checking the settings as you through the stages of configuring an account, but if you choose to use SSL (that is, to encrypt your connection so that passwords and messages are protected in transit) this can cause a bit of a pause. It does work.

• By default, recent versions of Mail will try the high submission port as well as the usual smtp port. The program maintains a list of sending relays, which you will sometimes see when one of them temporarily fails. To check or edit this list, you have to go into your account settings (for any account), find the ‘Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)’ dropdown list and select ‘Edit Server List’ at the bottom of that dropdown. How we miss the HIG.

This is the dialog you’re looking for and the sort of thing it ought to say

Notes for Outlook and Outlook Express

This is a bit sketchy as I don’t use them:

• There is a ‘Secure Password Authentication’ option. You don’t want that. You want normal authentication, but possibly within a secure connection (using SSL).

• When it comes to setting up the SMTP sender, Outlook will sensibly ask whether you want to use the same login settings for that as for receiving mail. You do.