SherwoodHosting Web and Email Hosting

Set up a new mailbox account on the server: To establish a new mailbox on the server (as opposed to just a forwarding address to another mailbox) (and as opposed to setting up just the access to an existing mailbox), go to your Cpanel, click on the EMail Accounts icon. To add a new mailbox "account", fill in your desired email address (just the username part of it, omit the @domainname.com), password, and if you need to limit the quota for how much the mailbox can hold, enter that (usually 10M (10 Megabytes) is sufficient).

WEBmail: SherwoodHosting.com supports only WEBmail via your CPANEL control panel. This is the easiest method to set up (there is no set up!) and access to send and receive email. WEBmail ("Horde" is the application we recommend you use) has many features that will help your email activities, such as: an inbox, address book,email folders, mailing lists, select and move/delete, task list management, calendars & reminders, marking and sorting messages by importance. No matter where you login from (even if not from your own computer), all your information is there.

Click for detailed step-by-step instructions on how to access and use WEBmail (horde).

Client mail readers (for example, outlook): Although we don't directly provide detailed support (nor supply) software that runs on your own computer, laptop, iPad, iPhone (or other PDAs) to read and send email, we do provide information on this site for you to use to set up your own email program, such as Outlook (see Outlook Express, which is similar but not exactly the same dialogue boxes used), Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, etc. Click here for information regarding setting up your own email program. We suggest for you to do a Google search for your specific device's set up instructions - typically the fields to fill in will be similar to the screenshot below.

Below is a typical settings panel in an email mailreader application, the one depicted is Outlook 2007. Fill in the red fields using your own domain name and email address, noting the "+" usage instead of the "@" as the "username" for the particular mailbox.

Web-based email readers: There are several dependable commercial web sites that are free to use for accessing your email inbox. These sites have banner advertising, and when you send a message from them, they include their advertisement at the end of your message. We no longer recommend using mail2web.com, since their server is slow and unreliable. Just use webmail from your own domain: www.mydomain.com/webmail (see description of Horde webmail reader).

Plans C & D hosting packages have the following free features that you can easily take advantage of, using the Mail Menu in your Cpanel. Additional help is available within the CPanel and Mail web pages themselves. Cpanel Tutorial

Add/Remove Accounts: Add your own additional email mailboxes (POP3 accounts). See adding a new email account below.
Default Address:

IMPORTANT: WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND NOT USING THIS FEATURE (i.e., leave it as   :fail:   or other setting) - Using DEFAULT just invites you to be able to receive any spam sent your way!

The Default Address is a last-call catch-all for routing received email: if an incoming message is addressed to a username that does not exist (as a Forwarder, POP3 Account, or Auto-Responder), then the incoming message is routed to the address you give in the Default Address dialogue box. For instance if your primary email address is main@mydomain.com, you can allow people to send email to sales@mydomain.com, info@mydomain.com, and support@mydomain.com and set the Default Address to point to main, then as a result sales, info, and support will all get delivered to main. Also anything else, such as maine@mydomain.com will get sent to main too. This is probably okay, unless you have an office with several POP accounts and you deal with confidential email messages, and do not wish the person in charge of reading the main account to read an accidentally mis-addressed email. Another feature of the Default Address is to use the keyword syntax :fail: (colon fail colon) to authoritatively reject email and send back a custom message that you enter, such as :fail: No such username exists at mydomain.com

      NOTE:   when setting your default address (if you really must
      use this feature), you MUST specify the ENTIRE email
      address (including the @domain.com)

Additional Warning w.r.t. your MAIN MAILBOX and DEFAULT ADDRESS:
The combination of setting the Default Address to :fail: (or :blackhole:) AND trying to use your main account mailbox will cause rejection errors when email is sent to that address (the main mailbox is the hosting account's username used as the mail address, each hosting account must have one main mailbox, sometimes known as the default mailbox account, but this is a slippery usage of the term "default").

When you change the "Default Address" in Cpanel to :fail: or :blackhole:, it kills all of your email that would otherwise have gone to the default address on your account. That means that you can no longer use the default email account.

If you set all of your (alias) forwarders to point to the main (default) email address, all of the incoming email will fail whenever Default Address is set to :fail:, even though the incoming email was directed to a valid forwarder (forwarded to the main account).

The solution is to not use the mail account email name and create a new email account and point all of my aliases to it instead. By not using the default account at all, and setting the Default Address to 'fail', you can get the behavior you are looking for.

If by happenstance you REALLY want to use the hosting account's username as a mailbox username, then contact us and we'll change your hosting account's username so that it's not a name you want to use as a mailbox username.

Auto-Responders (OUT OF OFFICE REPLY CANNED REPLY): Auto-responders are most frequently used for businesses or individuals to distribute a canned response such as a product list, directions, or information that you might not want to put directly on a web page. You fill in a form (described below) to look like the message you want sent back to whoever sends email to this account (which is entered in the "Email" yellow box).
From the CPANEL Mail Menu, select Auto-Responder, and then Add AutoResponder.
The Email blank entry field (yellow) is the username at mydomain.com which will respond to email that comes to it (we know of no way to filter/select/sort incoming emails like OUTLOOK does with its rules-- all email to this specified mail address will be responded to). Fill in the rest of this form with exactly how you want the responded message to look-- whom you want it to appear that it's From; the Subject of the responding message, and the Body (content) of the message. By clicking the HTML Message checkbox, you are indicating that the content Body has HTML tags in it. Be sure you click on Create in order to "sign in" this responder. To stop the autoresponder (e.g., when you return from vacation, click on DELETE for the line showing the autoresponder you created).
Advanced feature: There is a %syntax% notation that allows a list processing feature to insert into your auto response data (fields) from the email from your sender. For instance, you could begin your response message body,
Dear %from%,
I am on vacation until next week.
and the autoresponder would paste-in to the auto reply message the sender's email address. This may be an overkill for a simple out of office response, but if you're using it for a business response for product information, for instance, it might look a little more professional.

Block an E-mail: This versatile filter allows you to specify a simple rule that, when matched, rejects an incoming email message. For instance, if you wanted to reject email from marie, you would select From and contains and then fill in Marie in the blank. Similarly you could set up a rule that rejected emails that in the email message Body contains sex. However, beware that the rule comparator is very literal: messages containing a sentence like: "The concert will feature the Paul Winter Sextet." would cause the message to be rejected. Thus our advice is to stick with the Spam Assassin and limited usage of From-Contains Blockers.

Forwarders: A forwarder is an email address (not a mailbox however) that when sent to, forwards the email message on to the specified email address. To set a forwarder up, click on Forwarders, and then Add Forwarder. The entry box allows you to fill in the username of the email address and then (after the arrow) the target email address you want it forwarded to. If the target address is within your own domain, your domain name is optional. You must click on Add Forward to complete the operation.

An unusual but useful application of the Forwarder mechanism is to return a message to the sender to tell them "what to do," as in:
:fail: Please re-send your message to joe's new email at joe@mydomain.com
In this way, spam email will be rejected (and spam sending programs do not "read" this reply), and if it were a human, they could easily re-send the message as you've instructed.
A specific usage of this would be to foil the commonly used "webmaster" (or similar sales, orders, info, etc.) email addresses used by spam email senders. Here's the strategy to use: set up a forward that rejects email sent to webmaster with a message:
:fail: Please direct webmaster email to webmanager@mydomain.com
Then you can have a separate (real) mailbox for "webmanager".

See illustration and additional details here.

Mailing Address Lists: You can establish distribution lists that contain commonly used lists of email addresses, such as clients, members, family, etc. You may have several email lists [up to the number allowed in your plan], each with no limit of addresses. You may not use any SherwoodHosting.com resource for distributing unwanted email or spam email. To add a list, click on Add List, and then enter the list name (for simplicity, use no spaces or special characters other than - and _ ), and a password. This password is used for later editing the list, and is provided so that you could have someone else also edit the list but not have access to your own email account. Note for new accounts: your DNS must resolve before you can edit your list information.
The Mailman Maillist manager has documentation here.

Spam Assassin: This spam filter attempts to detect and mark in the subject line annoying spam email. To use this feature, click on the Spam Assassin menu item (Cpanel> Mail> Spam Assassin), and then click on the Enable button. Your incoming email will then be flagged in the subject line. Spam Assassin scans your incoming email (server-side) for telltale signs that spam email often has. It tabulates a "score" for that email—if the score is above its threshold, it will flag the email as spam in the subject header delivered to you. Note that S.A. does not delete email messages—you can still read them, just in case a message to you is worthwhile but looks like a spam email message.
Tip for OUTLOOK (and other email client applications) users: Because the Spam-Assassin only labels (marks) email to be suspect, you would normally still see it in your inbox. However, OUTLOOK has an incoming mail sorting feature which you can enable by a rule to move the suspect message(s) directly to the trash folder (or if you want to be safe, to a special SPAM folder where you can occasionally inspect if needed/questioned).

See "search order" for forwards-pop-default-mainaccount address matching for email delivery.

Just get my home page up quickly!

Or, Why is the home page I just uploaded not showing? (see also Index page not showing)

Steps to get your home page uploaded:

Create your home page using Dreamweaver, Contribute, FrontPage, or other web authoring tools
Name your home page file: index.html
Upload it to the directory /www/ (or the equivalent: /public_html/ )
Note if you're using an authoring tool such as Dreamweaver, you'll want to set the default root of your site to the above directory.

WEB ftp client set up