Managing email options in cPanel
July 16th, 2008 Posted in Building my websitesIntroducing cPanel
I’m introducing my brother to the joys of cPanel at the moment so it makes sense to put everything I know about it in this blog, for the benefit of him and anybody else getting to grips with this wonderful tool for the first time.
I’ve been working mainly on two of his seven domains which I’ve now moved over to a multi-domain cPanel account, bestisotonic.com and megacalltelecom.co.uk.
Let me set out my stall with cPanel … I like web stuff that’s simple, intuitive, accessible to keen amateurs and not produced by people with overwhelming intellectual capacities who can’t communicate with mere mortals.
If you can’t get to grips with it quickly, then frankly there’s bound to be a better product on the market, and these days it’s probably even free.
That’s where cPanel comes in.
I’ve dealt with many hosting companies for myself and clients in the past, but I keep coming back to cPanel as being the simplest, most comprehensive, intuitive product I’ve found.
Many different companies offer the cPanel interface, and some of those companies aren’t very good … try and find a hosting company you like which offers cPanel.
I use nativespace.co.uk for all my websites, it’s very good for multi-domain hosting, but for single domain hosting for clients I’ve been very happy with eUKhosting.com … both offer cPanel.
If you’ve found something better, please use the comments form below to tell me about it … but for my tastes cPanel is the tool of choice for anybody who’s above entry level in the website creation business.
Read more about it via Wikipedia and this extremely useful unofficial guide.
These practical tips by no means aim to replace the cpanel manual, but hopefully they’ll help to get you started really quickly and painlessly.
Also, please make sure you make use of the built-in video guides that come with cPanel as they’re very clear and extremely useful.
All new systems come with a bit of initial disorientation, but cPanel is well worth the effort and an essential part of your web-building repertoire.
Getting started with cPanel
I’m not going to dwell on the top section of your cPanel homepage, as most of it is pretty self-explanatory.
However, do check out the video tutorials as already mentioned, remember to change your password regularly to keep out evil webpeople, and if you want to change your colour scheme and layout, feel free to do so.
I’ll deal with the left hand side of cPanel in a future ie quotas, domains, bandwidth etc.
Brilliant email stuff!
I would switch to cPanel for its email capabilities alone.
This is what you can do:
1) Create multiple, custom email addresses … as many as you want … for free.
So if your domain name is www.mybusiness.co.uk you can create email addresses like:
… and so on and so on.
2) Create email forwarders ie someone sends an email to you@yourbusiness.co.uk and it’s automatically forwarded to your home email address ie you@btinternet.com
You have a professional email address and your customers (and spammers) never get to see your private email address.
3) Create auto-responders in either plain text or HTML.
When someone emails your business, they get an automatically generated response.
Normally, it might say ‘Thanks for your email, we’ll get back to asap’.
On my autoresponders, I use HTML to draw people deeper into my websites.
Creating email accounts in cPanel
If you host one domain on your cPanel account you’ll be able to do this with your single domain.
If you host multiple domains on your cPanel account, you’ll be able to do this with each of your domains.
For each domain name you own, you can quickly and easily set up email accounts until they’re coming out of your ears - for free.
It takes a minute to do and if you mess it up, change your mind, or an address gets hit by spammers, delete it and start again … as many times as you want to.
1) Click on the ‘Email accounts’ icon, as above.
2) Fill in the information as requested in the image below … make sure you write that deadly, uncrackable password down as you’ll never remember it otherwise!
The email can be anything you want … your name, admin, webmaster, contactus etc etc.
Once you’ve generated - and jotted down - your password, click the ‘Create’ button.
You now have a new, custom email account.
250MB is fine for starters, you can always increase the quota when your website starts to take off and you start to generate some real email traffic.
For multi-domain hosting, if you want to create another email account for a different domain (ie not laptopmanpaul.co.uk as in the example above) just select the domain you want to use in the drop down menu.
Tip: Don’t be distracted by the ‘weird’ options in the list. If my top level domain is xxxxxx.co.uk, so I get presented with the option laptopmanpaul.xxxxxx.co.uk as well as laptopmanpaul.co.uk.
As with all things that are strange and unpleasant, just ignore it, you don’t need it!
Creating email forwarders in cPanel
Once you’ve created your new email account you have three options for picking up your emails.
1) The easiest option for non-teccies is to simply forward it to the address you use as your personal email address.
That way, when you pick up your normal emails, your business emails will also be sitting there waiting for you.
All you have to do is click on the ‘Forwarders’ icon and then click on ‘Add Forwarder’ … ignore the domain forwarder below it, you won’t need something like that for a while, unless you have several email accounts on one domain.
In the screen grab on the left, you can see how it’s done.
Once again, ignore the weird options like laptopmanpaul.yourmaindomain.co.uk … just go for the things you recognise.
In the ‘Forward to email address’ box, simply type your personal, non-business email address.
Ignore the other nasty stuff, and click on the ‘Add forwarder’ button at the bottom of the page.
Now test it … send an email to your new email address fred@yourbusiness.co.uk and login in to your personal email account. Hey presto, it’s there! If it’s not, check your spam.
2) Pick up email via webmail. To be honest with you, I find this a hassle, so I’d avoid it.
It means digging out your password to retrieve your emails via Squirrelmail, Horde or Round Cube webmail and as you’ll already be retrieving emails from at least one account already, this is likely to be too much hassle. Use option 1) above or option 3) below.
3) When you created your new email account, you’ll have been given the option to’Configure mail client’.
This looks complicated, but it’s not. It’s simply inviting you to use Outlook Express to retrieve emails from your new account.
Usually the only bits of information you need to do this are:
Incoming mail server/Outgoing mail server eg mail.yourdomain.co.uk
Password eg something horrible like %6&783″.) … I hope you wrote it down somewhere safe like I advised!
Email address eg fred@yourdomain.co.uk
If you don’t know how to set up Outlook Express to retrieve your emails, use this simple guide.
Auto-responders
Want your website to look cool and professional?
Add an auto-responder so that when someone emails you at your new email address, they’ll automatically get a standard reply without you having to lift a finger!
You can add auto-responders in plain text or HTML, here’s how you do it.
First, click on the ‘Auto Responders’ icon shown above.
You’ll be presented with a list of the emails accounts (depending on how many email accounts you’ve set up) o which you can add an auto-responder:
Click on the word ‘Edit’ next to your chosen email account. This will present you with the options below:
In the Email box: Make sure you enter whichever email address you want this auto-responder to come from.
In the From box: Write your website name, your own name … whatever works best for you and your business.
In the Subject box: Use the code as it’s shown in the example.
If a customer sends an email to you titled ‘Enquiry about your prices’, your auto-responder will automatically come back with the title ‘Re: ‘Enquiry about your prices’ … how cool is that?
Other shortcut codes you may like to incorporate are shown below:
You also need to decide whether to send a plain text response or an HTML response, and tick or leave blank the ‘HTML’ box as appropriate.
A plain text auto-responder says something like ‘Thanks for emailing mybusiness.co.uk. We’ll get back to you within the next 24 hours.’
An HTML auto-responder sends an email message like the one below:
Thanks for contacting webcumbria.co.uk, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
More websites from webcumbria.co.uk
Email: webmaster@webcumbria.co.uk
Sign up to our newsletter
Whenever anybody contacts me via email, they are invited automatically to look at all my websites and sign up to my newsletter. Now that’s a useful marketing tool!
To create that HTML, just go into your usual website creation tool - Dreamweaver in my case - and create a tiny web page.
Make sure you leave any header/body stuff off that you’d normally get on a webpage (below), it’s not required for auto-responders:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
</head>
<body>
The code for the auto-responder example above looks like this:
<p align=”left”><font size=”2″ face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>Thanks
for contacting webcumbria.co.uk, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.<br>
</font><font size=”2″ face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”><strong>
</strong><br>
</font><img moz-do-not-send=”false” src=”http://webcumbria.co.uk/email_signatures/banners/webcumbria_small.jpg” alt=”webcumbria.co.uk”><br>
<font size=”2″ face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”><a href=”http://webcumbria.co.uk/newsletters/web_wall.html” target=”_blank”>More
websites</a> </font><font size=”2″ face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>from
webcumbria.co.uk</font><br>
<font size=”2″ face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>Email: <a href=”mailto:webmaster@webcumbria.co.uk”>webmaster@webcumbria.co.uk</a></font><br>
<font size=”2″ face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”>Sign up to our <a href=”http://webcumbria.co.uk/newsletters/?p=subscribe” target=”_blank”>newsletter</a></font></p>
Just cut and paste your code into the ‘Body’ window, then click on the ‘Create/Modify’ button.
Now send yourself an email and wait for your auto-response to come back … nice eh?
Tip: If you use images in your auto-responder you have to upload these somewhere on your website and include the full link to them in your auto-responder. Something like banners/webcumbria_small.jpg won’t work, it has to be the full path to the image ie
http://webcumbria.co.uk/email_signatures/banners/webcumbria_small.jpg
Also note that essential bit of code img moz-do-not-send=”false” which you can read more about on the Mozilla Thunderbird website.
A few things about spam
Putting spam catchers on business accounts is a dodgy affair.
Everybody who emails you is going to be doing so from an account that’s unfamiliar to your spam software, which means you might miss important emails.
cPanel comes with spam software built in, but experiment with it and take care that you’re not losing business emails.
cPanel comes with Boxtrapper built in and you can add it to individual or all accounts.
Basically, you can set it up so that when someone emails you for the first time, they get an automatically generated email asking them to confirm that their email came from a human being rather than a spam source.
Once they’ve done this, they get ‘whitelisted’, which means all emails they send in future automatically get sent you you without the authentication process.
The default messages created by Boxtrapper are a bit teccie, so I suggest you personalise them and take out the horrible technical information.
I’ve used Boxtrapper on all my accounts, but became concerned that a first email from my business asking you to get involved in an authentication process is a bit off-putting.
Consequently I’ve decided not to use it at the moment … but I’ll change my mind if I start to have spam problems or be forced to use ‘Contact us’ forms with Captcha as I already do on big-group-cottages.co.uk (I had to pay for that add-on though!).
cPanel advises you to use Boxtrapper with Spamassassin. I’ve found the two together a bit severe, and I worry too much about losing important business emails.
Experiment and see what you think, but the best and most intelligent solution I’ve found for managing spam is to use Googlemail to pick up my business emails. Its spam recognition is excellent, the only trouble is you can only pick up email from 5 accounts via this system.
If you’ve found any great solutions to spam blocking let me know, similarly if you have any tips to add to this page.
See more cPanel posts on laptopmanpaul.co.uk
Managing your domain in cPanel
Back-ups, managing files and FTP accounts in cPanel
Fantastico, php and MySQL databases in cPanel
One Response to “Managing email options in cPanel”
By John Williams on Aug 20, 2008
Pretty nice site, wants to see much more on it!