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Email FAQ

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Email is not Instant. It Only Appears that Way.

The first thing that any email sending person needs to be aware of is that Internet Email is designed to be a Store and Forward delivery system. (Only Instant Messenger type applications are Instant.) However, 99.99% of the time, the forwarding part happens very quickly and so everybody has come to take the immediacy of email delivery for granted.

In this day and age however, with over 3 out of 4 email messages traversing the internet being spam or virus-laden, that remaining 0.01% must be accounted for and recognized. This will sometimes cause bounces or delays.

When a message is rejected, proper email systems will return what is known as a bounce message to the sender. Example at right:
Example Bounce Message The rejection reason contained in this bounce message is imperative for us to be able to tell you why you either didn't get an email or the message you send came back to you marked as undeliverable.

Also be aware that many filtering systems will present a "user not here" type message when the user does in fact exist, but the filtering system doesn't want to give the sending system that it may be assuming is a spam system any clues that the user does exist.

Common errors for email sending and receiving:

Problem: I've forgotten or lost my email password
Solution: Email accounts are managed using our Mail Administration Control Panel
If you are not the administrator for your domain, ask them to reset your password or Contact Support.


Problem: My Email program keeps asking me for my password.
Explanation: This is occassionally caused by the inability of your email program (usualy Mac OS X Mail) to connect to our mail server.
Solution: Quit and Reopen the email program. It will reset itself and pick up where it left off and should remember your stored preferences.


Problem: My message never leaves my OutBox
Explanation: Many times the address of the person you are sending to will become fouled up with extra unnecessary characters.
Solution: Check the Addresses in your message. Sometimes email programs don't properly encode/decode email addresses and so instead of username@host.com, you'll have 'username@host.com' - In this instance, those extra tick marks are making the email address look simply like a name. Solution: Remove the tick marks '


Problem: I cannot send email from my hotel.
Explanation: Many hotels block outgoing port 25 which is used to send email
Solution: Change your outgoing port to the alternate 587 specifically designated for this situation.
See our client configuration pages.


Problem: I want all filtering for my domain removed as I forward my messages to another service that filters for me.
Solution: Turning off all filtering for a domain is not practical.
  1. 1. It needlessly increases the load on our server to have an 400% increase in message traffic (spam accounts for 80% of Internet Message traffic)
  2. If we did stop all filtering for your account, then the service you use would start to see our system as a source of spam and it is not in anyone's interest for us to become a recorded conduit of spam.
  3. As a solution, we can change the hosting for your email to point directly to that service.
  4. Orovide us with the MX records for that service and we can make the necessary change in our system.


Problem: Reverse DNS (rDNS) bounces
Reverse DNS is the Reverse (surprise) for Forward DNS.
Forward DNS is converting a name like www.domain.com or mail.macserve.net to an IP address.
Reverse DNS is converting an IP address back to a name. Mail Servers that are running on the internet should have the rDNS properly setup and mapped back to themselves.

The most common reason for rDNS blocks is that the sending system is running on an Internet Address that does not have a rDNS entry setup. The administrator for the sending server needs to make sure that is setup and setup PROPERLY!.

Problem: My email account is receiving an extremely heavy load of spam emails, thousands of them.
The spam emails are to/from totally bogus email accounts @mydomain.com.
Solution: The catch-all feature for your email is enabled and spammers are sending to ALLNAMES@mydomain.com.
Log in the MacServe.net Mail Admin and disable that feature.