Some frequently asked questions about email.
What incoming / outgoing mail servers should I use?
See the Email Setup page.
What is my email address?
See Your Email Address.
I can't send mail out through your servers - why not?
If you get either the error message "Relaying denied" or "Please authenticate first", you need to set your mail client up to authenticate to our servers. See the Email Setup page for how to do this.
Why did this email bounce?
If the bounce says something like "Mailbox 'myname' has been disabled"
This is because you have not logged into your POP3 mailbox for 90 days or more. To re-enable the mailbox so it can receive mail again, simply log in to the mailbox and download your mail.
Other bounces
Please forward the "bounce" message to support@power.net.uk as an attachment, and we'll take a look.
See also Missing Email for some general tips.
Why am I getting all these "bounce" messages about email I never sent in the first place?
A spammer has probably sent a load of spam with the sender address spoofed as yours. See Email Forgery.
Why is your email server sending us so much spam? Is it an open relay?
No, it's not an open relay.
The most likely reasons for you receiving so much spam from our server are as follows.
Our mail server is acting as a backup mail server (MX) for your domain. In this case, anyone who wants to send email to you may legitimately send the mail to any of the listed servers. If they send the mail to Powernet's server, then we will send it on to your server; hence, your server will see the email as arriving from our server. To find the real source of the email, you should find out who sent the email to Powernet's server (i.e. look at the next "Received" header down).
Our mail server has been configured to forward mail to your domain. For example, we may have a forwarding rule in place which says that any mail received for anything@example.com should be forwarded to anything@yourdomain.com. Any mail sent to anything@example.com will therefore appear to come from Powernet's server. To find the real source of the email, you should find out who sent the email to Powernet's server (i.e. look at the next "Received" header down).
My emails aren't getting through!
Please see Missing Email.
How can I receive less spam?
Please see Incoming Spam.
Why does all my mail get redirected to <mynodename>@mailboxes.powernet.com?
This is just the way that our email system works. In order to make the final "hop" from our main mail server over to the one that stores the POP3 mailboxes, the address gets rewritten to <yourname>@mailboxes.powernet.com, then the POP3 server receives that mail and stores it in the mailbox called <yourname>.
The fact that you're reading this, however, suggests that maybe you're trying to read the headers of the email to work out to whom the message was addressed (maybe so you can deliver it into the correct mailbox on your company's mail server). If that is the case, please note the following:
The presence of the "<yourname>@mailboxes.powernet.com" address in the headers does not indicate a flaw. That's just the way that the mail ends up in your POP3 mailbox.
To do this properly, you should use an SMTP feed, instead of downloading the mail via POP3. Mailbox delivery throws away the SMTP Envelope, and unfortunately the envelope is exactly what you needed. Any attempt to reconstruct the envelope once it's gone is always going to be guesswork.
- If you really want to try to find the envelope recipient, try looking in the second "Received" header of each message. That won't always give you the right answer (in particular for messages addressed to more than one recipient), but it should give you what you need in most cases. If you want it to work more accurately and reliably than that, you need an SMTP feed.