Manage My Mail Overview

Manage My Mail is used to manage the email addresses on your Plusnet account.

If you want to create, delete or edit your email addresses this is what you'd use.

1. Terminology used
2. The Summary tab
3. The Mailboxes tab
4. The Aliases tab
5. The Redirect tab
6. The Mailing lists tab
7. The Spam tab
8. The Catch All tab

Terminology used

• Email address - This is an address that you can give to someone to send you an email.
• Mailbox - A place where you email is stored. You can collect email from a mailbox using a username and password.
• Alias - An email address for which all email is delivered into a mailbox on your Plusnet account. The email address equivalent of a nickname.
• Redirect - An email address for which all email is delivered to an external address (i.e. to a Hotmail or Yahoo! account).
• Mailing List - Allows one or more people to send emails to multiple email addresses. Members of the list can maintain their own membership of the list.

The Summary tab

When you first go to Manage My Mail, the first thing you'll see is the Summary tab. See the screenshot and key below for information on the various sections:

The tabs let you navigate around the various sections. Click the Create New Email Address button to start the 'wizard'. You can click on a column heading to sort by that column. A list of your email addresses. Each email address is either a Mailbox, an Alias, a Redirect or a Mailing List. Click on the type to go to the relevant tab if you want to edit an existing address. Emails to aliases and redirects are sent to either mailboxes or external email addresses. This column shows you where the email will be delivered. If you want to delete an email address, click the trashcan icon. Note: your default mailbox can't be deleted. (You can rename this in the Mailbox tab if you wish.) In this example, the email address sample@ is a redirect and all emails sent to this address are delivered to support@plus.net. The trashcan icon is also shown - meaning you can delete sample@ if you want to. You can search your mailboxes. This is handy if you have lots of them. You can change the order, see the different pages (there are 10 email addresses to a page) and search. Just choose the option you want and click Go.

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The Mailboxes tab

Mailboxes are email addresses which you can use to pick up emails sent to them, using either email software (e.g. Outlook Express or Mac Mail) or our Webmail system. To stop just anyone accessing a mailbox, a password is used to protect it.

Click ADD NEW MAILBOX to create a new mailbox. You can rename your default mailbox (i.e. change the email address) by clicking rename. Click edit to change your mailbox password or delete to delete this email address.

Mailboxes are great if you want to set up separate email accounts for everyone in the family. Separate mailboxes allow you to keep your emails apart. You can also give family members email addresses without having to let them know the password for your main account. This is useful for:

• Keeping your email private.
• Stopping family members from accidentally logging into your Member Centre account and changing any details.

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The Aliases tab

Aliases are email addresses which are delivered to one of your Plusnet mailboxes. You might want to set up an alias if you have a name that's often spelt the wrong way. E.g. you may use an email address jon@ as a mailbox, and you decide to create an alias called john@ delivered to that mailbox.

Aliases are also useful for keeping an eye on where emails are being sent to you from. However, by signing up to a website or email list you are exposing your email address online. Unfortunately this means the chances of being spammed increase.

Click ADD NEW ALIAS to create a new alias. This example shows that email for the postmaster alias is delivered into the (default) mailbox called website. You can change which mailbox the email for the alias is delivered to by clicking the edit link. There is also a delete link for all aliases except postmaster, which can't be deleted.

By using an alias, you can track the sources of emails. E.g. if you find a website called 'Amazing Offers' which you need to register for to get into, you could set up an alias called amazingoffers@, with the emails delivered to your normal mailbox. If, in the future, you want to stop using that service, or you find you're getting lots of spam email to that address, you can simply delete that email address from your account. That means you don't have to worry about telling all your contacts that you're changing your 'normal' email address.

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The Redirects tab

Redirects are email addresses which are delivered to an email address which is external to Plusnet. E.g . you might want to forward emails to a work account, or to a service like Hotmail or Gmail.

Click ADD NEW REDIRECT to add a new redirect onto your account. This list shows where email to a redirect address is delivered. In this example, email for sample@ is delivered to support@plus.net. You can click the edit link to change where the redirected email is delivered to, or the delete link to delete the email address.

The redirect tab is also used to set up 'blackholed' email addresses. When an email is sent to one of these addresses the message is silently deleted when sent to you. This option is often useful if you've got an email address which you no longer use, but has large amounts of spam being sent to it.

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The Mailing Lists tab

You can run mailing lists from your account, if you want to. For full details on how to use this service, see our Mailing List Help Guide.

Click ADD NEW MAILING LIST to add a new mailing list. In this example, the mailing list isn't yet active. There are options to edit the mailing list options, or you can delete the mailing list if you want to.

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The Spam tab

Use this tab to decide how to treat any spam emails that are delivered to your email addresses.

If you have more than one domain on your account, you can choose which domain you want to make changes to. Ticking the box will apply changes to all of your domains. Use this option to block all mail to the domain you're currently working on. Here you can turn spam filtering on or off.

You may have noticed that there are more options on the Spam tab than are shown here. For more information on what these are and how to use them, please see our Spam Protection Guide.

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The Catch All tab

The Catch All service lets you choose that all email addresses that you've not listed on your account should be delivered to one of your mailboxes for downloading.

This can be useful if you want to use a lot of email addresses, but don't want to have to set them all up first before using them.

However, the Catch All service can mean that you'll get more spam email. This is because the number of email addresses which you have is effectively unlimited (as anything before the @ symbol is allowed).

Choose whether you wish to turn the Catch All feature on or off. If you turn the feature on, you can choose which mailbox will catch emails to unspecified addresses.

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This page last updated 29th October 2008