Usermail tips and requests Blog

• When new users signup, they must place your username in the “How did you find us:” box at the signup page.  There will be no exceptions!
• Your check will be sent to you 30 days after payment for the referred customer is made.  This is for our protection in order to prevent bogus and fraudulent transactions.
• You may not send mass mailings in order to acquire new customers.  This will result in a suspension of your own account.

Dear Customers,

I bought a Barracuda Model 400 last October.  Our current setup is as follows:
Barracuda GW —> Internal servers —> Spamassassin server —> Quarantine or local delivery.

Although there was a small percentage of spam being caught by adding the Barracuda, this was because I added my own Regex rules on the Barracuda.  Without my Regex rules, using their “intent” RBL, a trained bayes, and SBL-XBL RBL, the device gave me nothing in terms of more spam captured than Spamassassin with SARE.  In fact, I don’t have concrete numbers but I am willing to put $100 and say SA/SARE does better.

Because I am a customer, I have access to the Barracuda Networks forums.  I am not the only one unimpressed and since it’s a moderated forum, all the postings I have made which have a negative undertones, do not get posted.

OK, enough of that.  I bought the server in October (8 months ago) for about $4800.  This included a years license.  Well, the server has a bad drive based on their support’s diagnostics.  They want me to pay $899 to have it replaced!  FWIW, if you open the box yourself, it voids support.

I want to say that if your thinking of buying one of the Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall
(www.barracudanetworks.com), save your money!.  I would have been better off spending about $2000 for two decent servers and running SA/SARE at the perimeter.

I hope this helps somebody else from making the same mistake.

Brian

Dear Customer,

Because of the mobility of many of our customers, as well as the evolution of the cell phone, we felt it necessary to add WAP support to our list of features.  I personally own a Treo 650 and have been unhappy since day one with the IMAP clients available for the Treo.  The obvious answer was to install code in order to serve email to a WAP browser. 

I have spent the last 2 weeks install demos and have finally decided on one that I like.  Ironically, I tested many commercial products but was most pleased with pofhq-wapmail which is Open Source.

Please use this link to access the page: https://imap.usermail.com/wap/

If your WAP browser complains about the SSL certificate, you can use http://imap.usermail.com/wap/ instead

Please take a look and provide your feedback and comments.

Thank you,

Brian F.

This guide is designed to allow you to utilize the features of IMAP using Thunderbird.

1. Open Tools –> Account Settings
2. Click “Add Account” on the bottom left
3. Leave Email account checked and hit Next
4. Enter your first name or business name into the “Your name” field.
5. Enter your usermail.com address into the “Email Address” field. Click Next
6. Choose IMAP as your incoming server
7. Enter imap.usermail.com into the “incoming Server” field. Enter imap.usermail.com into the “outgoing server” field. Click Next.
8. Enter your username and click Next.
9. Enter “Usermail.com account” into the Account Name field. Click Next
10. Verify your settings.
11. Click Finish

Your set to go!

This guide is designed to allow you to utilize the features of IMAP using Outlook Express.

1. Open Tools —> Accounts
2. Under the Mail tab, click Add –> Mail
3. Enter your Display name.  This can be your First name or the name of your business.  Click Next
4. Enter your Usermail.com email address.  Click Next.
5. Change “my incoming mail server is a pop3 server” to IMAP.
6. Use imap.usermail.com for the incoming and outgoing server.  Click Next.
7. Enter your username in the “Account name” field and your password in the “Password” field.  Click Next.
8. Click Finish.
9. Click Send and Receive

Your now ready to use your account.

Because we are a spam free service, allot of time and resources are spent in insuring that spam does not make it to your inbox.  Our primary problem is with false positives.  A false positive is when we mark a message as spam, although the end user desired to receive the mailing.  Because our goal is to never have a false positive, we often times have to make a rule more liberal than we would like.  For example, if a spammer constructs a mailing that resembles a good mailing by the spam servers, we have to tweak the rules without being too aggressive.  This results in some spam getting through but allowing for all the good mail to be delivered to your inbox.

Unfortunately, this process isn’t perfect.  Lately, we have had a growing number of reports of false positives.  Because of this, we have made some changes.  Rather than keeping a global quarantine of everybody’s spam, we have setup a spam folder for every customer. Mail destined for your inbox that the anti-spam servers marked as spam will be delivered to this folder. Here are two methods that allow you to view your spam folder.

• Login to the web based client at http://www.usermail.com/.  Once logged in, you will see your spam folder in the left pane.
• Configure your email client to use IMAP.  The IMAP server address is imap.usermail.com.  This will give you readily access to your spam folder.

Mail in the spam folder will be stored for 14 days before being removed by the system. 

Q: What happens if a message in my Spam folder isn’t spam?

A: Please forward these mailings as an attachment to abuse@usermail.com.  Please place “Usermail FP” in the subject line.  It’s very important to receive this mailing as an attachment in order to so that we can view all headers. This will allow us to modify the anti-spam rules.

We hope that this change will result in a better experience for Usermail.com customers.

Thank you for your time and patronage,

Brian F

Many customers have reported problems sending mail using secure.usermail.com as their SMTP server.  Upon investigation, we usually find that the ISP has blocked external access to port 25. In the last article, I explained why email must connect to port 25 in order to be accepted by the MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) and relayed for local delivery or routed to another email server.  I am going to explain why some customers must use port 2525 instead.

A popular method of sending UCE or Unsolicited Commercial Email is to infect PCs residing on DSL or Cable broadband connections.  Through malicious, and illegal means, a spammer is able to install hidden software on a PC if it is not protected by a firewall and anti-virus software.  This hidden software allows for this spammer to have remote access to the PC.  Once the perpetrator has infected a large number of machines, a mass emailing is sent out selling the likes of low rate Mortgages and Viagra.  The amount of mail that can be sent out in a matter of an hour with 1,000 infected machines is in the millions!  Please read this article for more information:http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/whospamalrt.htm

Because of this method to send spam, many ISPs have chosen to block access to port 25 to any other servers than their own email servers.  Because of this, many of Usermail.com’s customers either have to use their ISP’s outgoing email server, or use port 2525 for their outgoing mail on secure.usermail.com.

In case your wondering:

Q: How does the server accept mail on port 2525 when you said port 25 is the standard?

A: Our servers use port 25 but also listen on port 2525 to accommodate those who have port 25 blocked but still want to use Usermail.com for their outgoing email.

Q: What is the difference between using my ISP’s SMTP (outgoing) server or Usermail.com’s?

A: The difference is minimal.  In fact, because you are connected through your ISP’s network, sending mail through your ISP will always be faster.  You want to make sure you use your Usermail.com address in your email client’s “From” field however.

In the next article, I will explain how to change the default port of 25 to 2525 in the more popular clients such as Outlook, Entourage, Outlook Express, etc.

The Internet uses a mechanism of transporting data called TCP/IP.  Built into the framework of TCP/IP are many types of traffic.  Some examples are web pages (http and https), FTP, Email retrieval (POP3 is one), and Sending email (SMTP).

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. To put it in simple terms, it is the framework designed to run over TCP/IP for the purpose of relaying mail.  What is relaying mail?  When Usermail.com takes your messages and transfers it to a Gmail.com server, this is considered a relay.

Now, let’s take this a step further.  Based on the requirements of TCP/IP, each service needs to use specific ports.  There are more than 65,000 ports that TCP/IP uses, but port 25 has been exclusively reserved for SMTP traffic.  So, when you send an emailing from Usermail.com to Gmail, our servers will connect to the servers at Gmail.com on port 25 and relay the message.

Hopefully, this explains why, when setting up your email client, the outgoing server uses port 25 as its default port.

In my next article, I will explain why many customers have to use port 2525 in order to relay through Usermail.com.

Brian F.

Hello all,

We have placed this up so that our customers can easily tell us what we are doing right, and what we are doing wrong.  We would also like to have input as to what you would like to see done differently or a feature request.  Because our support team will be monitoring new posts, feel free to post general support requests as well.

We hope you choose to use this tool in order to communicate your ideas.

Thank you,

Brian F.