Common Email Questions

1. How do I setup my email?
2. When will my new mail account start working?
3. What are extra mailboxes, how do I use them?
4. What are my email storage limits?
5. Can I send an email to lots of people at the same time?
6. How can I deal with spam email?
7. Can I access my email when I'm away from home?
8. Will my email service be closed down if I stop using it?
9. What is Tarpitting and how does it work?
10.What is an email alias?
11.What is my 'Catch All' address?

1. How do I setup my email?
If you are a new customer, or for some reason you need to set up your email again, we have some helpful guides to setting up email.

There are two ways to use your email:

1) Install software, called an email client onto your computer. This will let you download emails to be stored on your computer. You may already have this software installed - most Windows computers come with Outlook Express or Outlook. If not, there are many email programs that can be downloaded for free. See our Email Setup Guides.

2) Use Webmail, which lets you send and receive email through our website. This has an additional benefit that you can use your email from any computer that has an Internet connection. For more information see our Guide To Webmail.
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2. When will my new mail account start working?
It will take about an hour before your new account is activated and you can start sending and receiving emails.
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3. What are extra mailboxes, how do I use them?
You can create these to use different email addresses for different situations, or for different members of the family to use. Any email that is sent to you with the mailbox name before the '@' symbol will be stored in the mailbox. E.g. if you create a mailbox called 'sales', all emails that are sent to sales@username.plus.com will be delivered to the mailbox, instead of your default mailbox. You need to log in to extra mailboxes separately from your default mailbox.

Please note: If you've created extra mailboxes, make sure you've read how they work. If you don't do this it may appear that some of your emails are going missing, when in fact they are being delivered to your extra mailbox. Guide To Mailboxes.
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4. What are my email storage limits?
There are no limits for email storage except for unread emails. If you have more than 25Mb of unread email on our servers for more than 30 days we will remove the unread emails without further notice. We do this to make sure our email network runs optimally all the time for all of our customers.
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5. Can I send an email to lots of people at the same time?
You can send an email to more than one person by adding addresses to the send To: or CC: line. Note: as a means of protecting our mail system from spammers, the speed at which emails are sent becomes slower as you send it to more people. You can learn more on our section about Tarpitting.
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6. How can I deal with spam email?
Spam filtering is available on most accounts. Once this is activated, all emails which the system believes to be spam have the header tagged with [-SPAM-]. This lets you easily manage the using mail delivery rules. You can choose to delete emails that are tagged as spam, or move them into a dedicated spam directory. This is helpful because no spam filter is 100% effective. Some spam will always get through untagged, and occasionally a legitimate email will be tagged as spam by mistake. You can find out more information in our Spam Protection Guide
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7. Can I access my email when I'm away from home?
You can access your emails from anywhere with an Internet connection. The easiest way is to use Webmail. You can also setup a mail program such as MS Outlook Express to receive your mail from a different location.

Important Note: If you are connecting to the Internet from a different location, you won't be able to use the PlusNet outgoing server. Instead you will need to send your emails using the outgoing server provided by the ISP on which you are connecting.
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8. Will my email service be closed down if I stop using it?
Accounts for which no subscription is paid (Pay As You Go dial-up) are deactivated if unused for a 90-day period. Email service on deactivated accounts will no longer work. To prevent the loss of your email service you should connect to your email, FTP space or use the account dialup number at least once every 90 days.

Pay As You Go dial-up accounts that host a domain or use extra paid-for services will not be deactivated. If your account has already been deactivated due to inactivity, and you wish to reactivate it, you should use Help Assistant to request reactivation. Note that emails that were sent to your accont while it was deactivated would have been sent back to the sender.
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9. What is Tarpitting and how does it work?
Tarpitting helps keep our email system safe from spam abuse. If you use the email system to send bulk mailings (i.e. the same message to lots of people) you'll see short delays between sending emails. The more emails you send the more these delays will increase.

There won't be any delay to the first 4 emails that are sent. However, after the 5th email, a delay is introduced between each email sent and the person it's been sent to. This means that if you send a large number of emails to a large number of people, some of these emails may take a much longer time to be delivered.

Here are some examples of how tarpitting could delay your email:

Send 1 email to 20 people - 4.5 second delay
Send 1 email to 40 people - 23.6 second delay

Tarpitting only applies to emails sent within one connection to the mail server. If mail is sent as individual connections to the server then tarpitting doesn't apply.
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10. What is an email alias?
An alias is used to give one of your mailboxes an alternate name, so that email going to the alias name will be delivered to your selected mailbox. For example, you could could create an alias called 'mike' for a mailbox called 'michael' so that emails sent to 'mike' are delivered to the michael mailbox. This offers the benefit of only having to check a single mailbox. More about Aliasas in our Mailbox Guide.
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11. What is my 'Catch All' address?
A 'Catch All' mailbox will accept emails to any name that doesn't have its own mailbox. If you are sent emails to different names, this helps ensure you get receive them. However, spam emails are often sent to random names at an email address. By switching off the 'Catch All' status of a mailbox you can limit the emails you receive to only those sent to valid mailboxes. Learn more about 'Catch All' in our Mailbox Guide.
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