Most users utilize the IMAP protocol for email, which leaves a copy of the messages on the server, whereas POP3 downloads the mail only to your local PC and often deletes the server’s copy of the message.

Since a copy gets retained on the server, IMAP accounts can grow extremely large if messages aren’t regularly deleted, eventually slowing down your email client & the backend server.

The solution is to create regular backups locally and purge out any unnecessary data on the server side.

Email Backups

Creating regular backups of your email account ensures that your critical emails, attachments, contacts, and other valuable data remain accessible and recoverable, even in unexpected situations such as email server failures, hacking attempts, and synchronization errors. 

There are several different ways to create a backup of your email data, and we’ve provided a few of the more popular free solutions below.

Hosting Account Backup

If your account is less than 10GB, it’s possible to generate a full backup of the hosting account, including any email accounts, using the Backup Wizard tool. 

The Backup Wizard generates a complete 1:1 backup of your current hosting account, with the email content stored in the /mail/ directory. These backups are easy to restore on another server but have limited utility for local use or searching.

Email Clients with Backup Features:

Some email clients have built-in backup features that allow you to export your emails and related data. 

Mozilla Thunderbird

Thunderbird allows you to archive email accounts using the built-in Export/Save-As functionality. 

Third-party add-ons like ImportExportTools can speed up this process by providing additional tools for exporting a whole folder at once or converting the exported messages to HTML files(viewable in a web browser).

Microsoft Outlook

Outlook offers export options to create backups of your emails, contacts, and calendars in the PST format.

Aside from saving the account, it’s also possible to save/export individual messages using the Save As function like Thunderbird.

Refer to the Microsoft documentation on generating a PST backup.

Gmail

Gmail can fetch and send messages from external servers, like your GreenGeeks hosting account, and it’s simple to configure.

When you set up the account in Gmail, it will download all of the existing messages to your Gmail Inbox.

These messages can then be purged from the GreenGeeks server, reducing your usage while leaving a copy of the messages in Gmail for archival.

Gmail will automatically check for future messages once per hour, but the exact frequency varies based on email volume.

Refer to the GreenGeeks Support Article for step-by-step instructions on connecting your GreenGeeks Email with your Gmail Profile. 

MailStore Home

In addition to the email-client-based tools, dedicated email backup tools and scripts allow you to create backups of your IMAP emails in searchable, easy-to-restore formats. 

MailStore Home: MailStore is a powerful Windows-based tool that supports various email platforms, including IMAP, and the best part is that it’s free for personal use.

You can backup your email data locally, export it to a file/archive, or upload the messages to another email account/server.

Other Tools

In addition to specialty GUI tools like MailStore, there are also some powerful command-line-based tools, which may require some technical knowledge. 

• • imapsync: a command-line tool that can synchronize or backup IMAP mailboxes from one server to another.
  • OfflineIMAP: Python-based tool for synchronizing local maildirs with remote IMAP accounts.

The post How to Backup Email Accounts appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

Email Headers

Think of email headers as the envelope of a physical letter that contains the mailing address, postage, and other details.

When you send an email, your mail server attaches this header information to the message. As the email traverses through various mail servers, each server adds its own “Received” entry to the header, creating a trail of the email’s journey.

Here’s a breakdown of the main components you’ll find in an email header:

1. From: This field shows the sender’s email address or name, indicating who sent the email.
2. To: This is the recipient’s email address (and name), showing who the email is for.
3. Subject: The subject line briefly summarizes the content or purpose of the email.
4. Date: Indicate the date and time the email’s sent.
5. CC (Carbon Copy) and BCC (Blind Carbon Copy): These fields show any additional recipients for the email; CC recipients are visible to all others, while BCC recipients remain hidden from others, ensuring privacy.
6. Reply-To: If the sender has specified a different email address for replies, one different from the From address.
7. Message-ID: A unique ID assigned to each email during handling on the mail server.
8. MIME-Version: This field indicates the email’s MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) version, which defines the email’s content type and formatting.
9. Received: This section contains a series of entries, each representing a mail server through which the email passed. These entries are added in reverse order, showing the routing information related to each server the message traveled on, from the sender’s server to the final recipient’s server.

While most regular users may not need to deal with email headers directly, email headers are critical when troubleshooting email delivery issues or tracking SPAM/phishing campaigns. 

GreenGeeks Support technicians often examine email headers to diagnose problems, such as identifying delivery delays or verifying the authenticity of an email.

View the Email Headers & Source of an Email Message

Roundcube

In Roundcube webmail, finding the email headers and the email’s source and headers is a little different from other email clients. 

Here’s how you can access the email headers and source in Roundcube:

1. Access Roundcube: Open your web browser and navigate to your Roundcube webmail login page, which is often https://webmail.domain.com
2. Login to Roundcube: Enter your email address and password to access your mailbox.
3. Open the Email: After logging in, locate the email which you want to view the headers and source. Click on the email to open it in the reading pane.
4. Click the More: Click More … button to show the dropdown menu at the top-right of the Roundcube window.
5. Select “Show Source”: In the dropdown menu, look for an option called “Show Source; click on this option to open the email’s source code, including the complete email headers and the message source.
6. Viewing Source Code: Once you click “Show Source,” a new window or tab will open, displaying the email’s source code. You will see the entire email message along with all the headers, including “From,” “To,” “Subject,” “Date,” and other header fields.
7. Analyzing Headers: You can now review the email headers to gather information about the email’s origin, sender, recipient, and the route it took to reach your mailbox, or provide this information to GreenGeeks in the raw form for further analysis.

Other Email Clients

To learn how to view the headers and source on other email clients, GreenGeeks recommends this guide from MXToolbox.

It covers step-by-step instructions for almost every popular email client including Outlook, Thunderbird & MacMail.

The post Email Headers & Message Sources appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

Unfortunately, not every email you send is actually going to be sent and may get blocked by some form of interference. Due to how common an issue this is, cPanel provides tools that allow you to track what emails were sent, and why they failed.

Today, I will cover some of the basic features cPanel provides in regard to tracking email delivery in WordPress.

How to Keep Track of Email Delivery in cPanel

Keeping track of the emails your website sends out is actually pretty easy to do in the cPanel. It has a dedicated tool for just that. You will need access to your website’s cPanel. If you need help logging in, contact your web host for additional help.

Step 1: Enter the Track Delivery Tool

Log into your web hosting account and access the cPanel. Once there, locate the Email area and click on the Track Delivery option.

Step 2: Search For A Specific Recipient (Optional)

If you are already aware that a specific recipient is not receiving emails and want to focus on that, you can use the search functionality at the top. Enter the recipient’s email address in the provided text box and click on the “Run Report” button.

Doing so will pull up the full email log for that recipient. Simply use the information provided to see what is going wrong.

Step 3: View the Full Email Log

There’s a very good chance that the person who is supposed to receive emails is not aware they are not getting them. And truth be told, they are not very likely to contact you about the issue if they are aware.

Instead, you need to be more proactive by taking a look at the full email log. Luckily, this is pretty easy to find.

In fact, you are already looking at it if you just scroll down the page. The Delivery Report is a full email log for your entire website. If an email has a green checkmark, then the email was successfully sent without issue.

However, if there is a red exclamation mark, then the email failed to send. It looks like this:

Step 4: View the Explanation of the Failure

To view the full report and what occurred, click on the blue exclamation point in the Actions column.

This will pull up a small pop-up with the full details of the failure. Review them to spot the issue.

And that concludes how to identify why an email delivery failed from your cPanel.

The post How to Track cPanel Email Delivery appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

Once you set up your GreenGeeks email, you can then get it up and running on your Apple iPhone. Remember, it is important you actually set up an email account in cPanel first, then follow the steps below to add email to your iPhone.

Step 1: Open Settings and Go to Mail

Open the Settings function on your iPhone and scroll down until you see the mail tab and click on it.

Step 2: Click on Accounts

In the Mail section, click on the “Accounts” tab.

Step 3: Click on Add Account

Scroll to the bottom of your account section and click on the “Add Account” tab.

Step 4: Select Mail Type

From this page, you are given a list of mail types. Click on the “Other” option.

Step 5: Click on the Add Mail Account Option

There will be several account options available from here. Simply click on the “Add mail Account” option.

Step 6: Fill in New Account Information

Go ahead and fill in all the new account information that is relevant to the account. When you are finished, the “Next” button on the top right will turn blue and you can click it.

Step 7: Fill Out Server Settings Info

The final step involves you picking whether you want the account to be IMAP or POP, and then filling out all the server settings for the account. You will need to have the following information:

• Username: Which is often your email address depending on your web host provider.
• Password: Obviously the password for the account you wish to access.
• Account Type: Choose which you want to use, POP3 or IMAP. This will be dependent on the type of mailing protocol you want to use.
• Incoming Mail Server: This is the server name of your inbound email. Often, it will look something like “mail.yourdomainname.com.”
• Outgoing Mail Server: This server is more than likely going to be the same as your incoming mail.

Note: If you are unsure of any of the server info, please Contact Us and we can give it to you.

When you fill these settings in, click on the blue “Next” button again to finish the process.

That’s it! At this point, your new GreenGeeks email account should be up and running on your Apple iPhone.

The post How to Set Up GreenGeeks Email on an iPhone appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

No matter which email program you choose, the configuration will require login credentials for the email account and the server information. The server information is something you need to find on your server. It includes IMAP, POP3, and SMTP.

Step 1: Enter the cPanel

Log into GreenGeeks and go to cPanel by clicking the “cPanel” button in the Your Accounts section.

Step 2: Access the Email Accounts

In the Email section, click the Email Accounts” option.

Step 3: Locate Your Server Info

You should now see a list of the email accounts associated with your web hosting account. Each one of these has the same options available.

Click the “Connect Devices” button in the row for the email account that you are adding to your email program.

The top of the next page will provide some automatic configuration scripts for a few email programs.

For our purposes, we’re going to scroll down to the “Mail Client Manual Settings” section to see the connection configuration information.

The information here should be all that’s needed to set up the vast majority of email programs or connections.

The post Where to Find Mail Server Login Information for GreenGeeks-hosted Domains appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

There must be something else out there, right?

There is, and you probably already use it. Gmail. That’s right; you can read and reply to mail that comes into addresses on your domain name through the Gmail interface.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to use Gmail as your email program for GreenGeeks-hosted domains, or anywhere else your POP email accounts are hosted.

There are ten steps, but they’re easy to complete.

Configuring Gmail for a Domain Hosted Anywhere

These instructions use a regular Gmail account as an example. For G Suite Gmail accounts, some of the labelings may differ, but the general workflow is the same.

Step 1

Log in to Gmail and click the gear icon.

Step 2

Click the “See all settings” button.

Step 3

Click the “Accounts and Import” tab.

Step 4

Next to “Check mail from other accounts,” click “Add a mail account.”

Step 5

An orange popup window will open. Enter the email address that you want to check using Gmail. Click the “Next” button.

Step 6

Select “Import emails from my other account (POP3)” and click the “Next” button.

(The “Gmailify” option is for linking accounts from major webmail providers like Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, and Hotmail.)

Step 7

Next, you’ll be on the “Add a mail account” page where you enter your current incoming email server settings.

In this example, I’m using an email address hosted at GreenGeeks, so I’ll use the GreenGeeks-specific configuration. If the email address is hosted elsewhere, the ports and server settings may be different.

If you’re unsure of the settings, check out the article, Where to Find Mail Server Login Information for GreenGeeks-hosted Domains.

• Username is typically your complete email address, not just the part before @.
• Password is the POP account password that you used when you set up the email address.
• POP Server will be pre-populated with mail.ggexample.com (where ggxample.com is the domain name for the email address you entered earlier).
• Port is 995.
• Check the box for Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail.

Everything else can be left in its default state.

If you do not intend to use Gmail exclusively, check the box for “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server” that will allow you to pull your mail down from another source in addition to Gmail.

Note that if you use that option and your GreenGeeks-hosted email boxes become full, incoming mail will bounce. To prevent that from happening, do not check “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server.”

Click the “Add Account” button.

Step 8

The next window will verify that your account has been added.

You will also be given the option of being able to send mail “as” the new address. If you intend to use Gmail as your only email client, or if you ever want to respond to the incoming mail for your newly set up account, select “Yes, I want to be able to send mail as…” and click the “Next” button.

Step 9

In the next window, enter the name you want to appear as the “sender” or “from” name of the outgoing email.

In most cases, you want to leave “Treat as an alias” checked (see this Google explanation of the setting).

Click the “Next Step” button.

Step 10

Enter your current outgoing (SMTP) email server settings and click the “Add Account” button.

If you’re unsure of the settings, check out the article, Where to Find Mail Server Login Information for GreenGeeks-hosted Domains.

If you are adding a GreenGeeks-hosted email but do not have SSL on the account, you’ll enter the server name in the SMTP Server field, rather than the domain name.

Step 11

Before Gmail lets you send mail from the new address, they want to verify that you can receive mail there, so they send a verification code.

You can click a link in the verification email, or cut and paste the confirmation code in the “Confirm verification and add your email address” box as shown below, and click the “Verify” button.

The popup window will disappear, and you’re ready to go.

You’ll now see the address you added in the “Accounts and imports” settings.

Both the regular Gmail account and the G Suite Gmail account will let you add up to five outside email accounts using this method.

The post How to Use Gmail for a Domain Hosted at GreenGeeks (or Anywhere Else) appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

What Are SPF and DKIM?

The two major tools in email deliverability are SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) records.

• An SPF record contains information about which IP addresses are authorized to send mail from your domain. So when you send a message, the receiving server compares the IP address information in the message with the IP address information in your publicly available SPF record. If they are a match, the email is delivered.
• When a DKIM record is added to the DNS zone for a domain, a code is added to the DNS zone and the headers of outgoing messages. The receiving servers compare the code in the headers with the information in the DNS zone. If they are a match, the email is delivered.

The methods are similar, with the receiving server checking DNS records to authenticate messages, but SPF uses path-based authentication (your server’s IP address) while DKIM uses identity-based authentication (the unique code in your message headers).

If it sounds complicated, the good news is the records can be created and published automatically for your GreenGeeks hosted email accounts. The cPanel “Email Deliverability” section is where DKIM and SPF records are created or managed, and where the status of PTR (Reverse DNS) records is displayed.

How to Authenticate All of Your Email in a Few Easy Steps

Method 1: Using the Account Manager

Log in to GreenGeeks and from the main dashboard page, click on the “Manage” button.

On the page that opens up, select the “Email” tab option and in the dropdown menu select “Email Deliverability.”

On this page, you will see all domains you have listed. You can also see that under the “Email Deliverability Status” that all the records are valid and correct.

You can see Click the ‘Manage” button next to whatever one you want to view the DKIM and SPF records.

The “Suggested ‘SPF’ (TXT) Record” and “Suggested ‘DKIM’ (TXT) Record” fields will be pre-populated with the system’s recommendations (if there are no existing records, the recommendations can’t be edited, they can only be accepted).

Method 2: Using cPanel

To access the email deliverability tools, log in to GreenGeeks and go to cPanel by clicking the “cPanel Login” button in the “Quick Server Login” section.

In the “EMAIL” section, click the “Email Deliverability” link or icon.

If the “Problems Exist” warning is shown, click the “REPAIR” or “MANAGE” buttons. “REPAIR” takes you through the settings step by step, “MANAGE” is all of the controls on one page, used for manual configuration or copying values to your DNZ zone file.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we will use the “REPAIR” button.

Note that the “REPAIR” button will not be available if your DNS does not point to the GreenGeeks server.

If you’ve never set up any email authentication, the first thing you will see after clicking the “REPAIR” button is “A DKIM key for ‘ggexample.com’ does not exist on the local server.”

Click the “GENERATE LOCAL DKIM KEY” button.

The “Suggested ‘SPF’ (TXT) Record” and “Suggested ‘DKIM’ (TXT) Record” fields will be pre-populated with the system’s recommendations (if there are no existing records, the recommendations can’t be edited, they can only be accepted).

Click the “REPAIR” button to add the records to the DNS zone of the domain.

When you go back to the main Email Deliverability page, you should see a “Valid” status (it may take a minute or two for the records to be checked).

For further information, take a look at the cPanel Email Deliverability documentation.

The post Using the Email Deliverability Tools for GreenGeeks appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

Log in to your Outlook.com account.

Click the cog icon in the upper right corner.

A “Quick settings” box will pop up. Scroll down to the bottom of the box and click the “View all Outlook settings” link.

Click the “Junk email” link.

Under “Safe senders and domains,” click the “+ Add” link.

Enter the domain name you wish to whitelist, then hit the Enter key on your keyboard.

To be sure you receive all email related to your GreenGeeks account, you should add greengeeks.com, and if you have a reseller account, you may also want to add websitehostserver.net.

Click the “Save” button.

The post How to Whitelist GreenGeeks in Outlook.com appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

The post Configuring the Mozilla Thunderbird Email Program appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

The post Setting Up Email on Windows Live Mail appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.