FAQ's

FAQ's

Mail Servers:

Our Web Based Email Client supports : Multiple Personalities, Multiple Simultaneous POP Accounts, Spell Checking, Calendar, Task List, Filters, and more!

We offer virus scanning for 100% of the email into and out of your domain. Fact - Over 85% of viruses enter networks via e-mail. This is an optional service. Our Anti-Virus system also includes an impressive suite of Anti-Spam engines that can reduce the amount of spam you receive by 95% or more. See our packages page or contact support for details.

Having trouble receiving your email ? Make sure your "account name" is your fully qualified email address ! ie: billy_bob@somedomain.com ... Passwords *are not* case sensitive.

POP3 disconnects ? Norton Anti-Virus 2003, 2002, 2001. Almost everyone who has installed it is having trouble with "server has unexpectedly disconnected" error message. This also seems to happen if it's configured to proxy SMTP.
Disabling email scanning in Norton solves the problem, it's an issue with the POP3 proxy service built into the application. This is documented extensively at the Symantic web site

Having trouble sending your email ? Several ISP's firewall SMTP so you must use their email servers to send email. If they have blocked port 25 [ SMTP ] try port 587, or 7587 as an alternative. In Outlook Express this is on the properties | advanced tab. If however, you can connect with our mail servers you *must* use authenticated SMTP in order for our servers to relay mail for you. In OutLook / Express this is accomplished by checking the "My Server Requires Authentication" check-box on the Account | Properties | Servers, TAB.

ALL of our email accounts are fully web enabled. If all else fails, you can always retrieve your email from anywhere in the world that you can obtain browser access to the internet. Simply navigate to our home page http://www.easent.net and select the "WebMail" link. Log on with your fully qualified email address and password and manage your email. Great when traveling ! Our email servers are also WAP enabled which will allow access via a cell phone or PDA. Simply navigate to http://www.easent.net/wap/ and you will be redirected to the WAPMail site automatically.

Cut down the spam ! We have servers dedicated to analyze all email processed through our anti-virus system for spam. We will reduce the amount of spam received to your mail boxes by 95% or more ! This service is included with our Anti-Virus system. Truly "World-Class" email service. The Anti-Virus system is an optional service. We provide a web based interface into this system that allows you to manage all email processed through our servers, rescue false positives, report detected spam, help teach the system, and set up custom black and white lists among other things. The interface is very powerful and user friendly.

Not Configured to Relay for ..... ! You MUST use authenticated SMTP to send email through our servers, see the simple step by step instructions below.

Step by step configuring your O/E email client for PC or MAC
PC
- Step 1
- Step 2
- Step 3
- Step 4
MAC
- Step 1
- Step 2
- Step 3
- Step 4
Many thanks to Nick for the MAC menu images !
Eudora
- Step 1
Thunderbird
- Step 1

We use SPF on our servers and provide SPF records for all of our customers domains.

What does this mean for me? Well first off, if someone tries to forge your email address and send email to a receiving server that has SPF implemented, that mail will be rejected. This addresses the spoofing techniques used by spammers and virus writers. As SPF becomes more widely adopted, it will reduce the amount of spam and virus that are able to propagate.

Is there a down side? Possibly. If we host your email account, and you use a "From" email address of your email account here, and then try to send email via some other providers email servers, it will probably be rejected by any MTA's that have SPF implemented. The solution is quite simple, send your email through our servers, we provide SMTP ports outside what would normally be fire-walled by other providers, or use the proper "From" address for the email servers / accounts you are currently using. Our alternate ports are listed elsewhere in this FAQ

I sent email to someone at AOL and * it didn't arrive, * it was bounced with some weird message about my ISP and open relays, * bounced with some other stupid message. This is typical for AOL. They are totally clueless about how to manage email. This is nothing new, however, the problem is continually growing worse. All ISP's have this problem with AOL email. Our recommendation is that people that seriously need reliable email get a reliable ISP, AOL certainly is not an ISP and is not reliable. Note also that we do comply with all their idiotic "postmaster" requirements. Their statements regarding open relays, open proxies, and DSL or dial-up IP's in their bounce response are not only ridiculous but incorrect as well.

I had my box forwarded to an AOL account, now it's not working If you forward email from our servers to an AOL account and decide to use the "this is spam" functionality at aol, those reports are aimed at our servers, we look like an open relay and end up being throttled or blacklisted. We no longer support forwarding from our boxes to AOL, ATT.NET, and Yahoo accounts. This in no way effects normal sending of email, only automatic forwarding of messages. On other domains the forwarded email may come as an attachment stating where the email was forwarded from. We will implement this feature for any customer domain.

I can't send or receive certain attachments ! Due to the increasing worm and virus attacks we have implemented the following steps to cut down the over all effect. File extensions like .pif, .scr, .bat, .exe, .com, .cmd, and some others will be rejected by our email servers. This simply protects everyone. If you have attachments that would otherwise be rejected because of this, simply zip them up and attach the zip file. Other archive formats like .arc, .gz, etc will also be permitted. Note: some worms actually deliver the payload as a ZIP file. Be warned that just because it's zipped doesn't make it safe. Our anti-virus scanner optional service will scan inside zips. All inbound password protected zips will be dropped by the anti-virus system.

I can't send large attachments ! What is large ? Many ISP's and email providers like Mindspring, Earthlink, msn, hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc all have relatively small maximum email size limits. These range from 1mb to 4mb. While we provide significantly larger limits it's not good to send large files via email, it's simply not reliable as each server along the way will probably have different size limits set. There's no guarantee it will be delivered even if we accept it for delivery. Email is a text based medium, sending binary data like zip, word, images, videos, or pdf files requires them to be converted to a character format like base 64 or uuencode. This conversion can increase the actual size of an email by 33% to 100%. Mail servers will see the converted, text format size of an email.

I added members to my Lyris list and some were automatically unsubscribed ! We will automatically remove and blacklist any member that has reported any mailing from our list servers as spam. This is due to a number of white-listing agreements we have with other providers. Please insure your members have your lists white-listed and use the normal unsubscribe channels available. Any member that reports a mailing as spam will be removed from all lists on our servers and permanently banned. As a list owner you can contact Support and we will reinstate the member. We will not reinstate a member more than once.

Maintenance Windows:

We will perform weekly automated maintenance between 04:00 and 04:30 every Sunday morning. This maintenance should have very limited effects on accessability, outages if any, will be only a few minutes.

We will perform major maintenance between 04:00 and 07:00 Saturday and or Sunday mornings, when required. Notice will be posted on the home page.

Web Servers:

DNS points only to the root of your site, you must have a page that is displayed by "default". On IIS servers this is typically Default.asp and Default.htm. We have added Index.asp and Index.htm to help facilitate the migration of UNIX sites and developers ... The files will be searched for in the following order: default.asp, index.asp, default.htm, index.htm, and Default.aspx for .NET support ... Likewise, our *nix/Apache hosing supports default.htm and default.html as default indexes and they are searched after index.html, index.htm and index.php.

My Includes don't work : When using server side includes you must have your files named with .HTML, .ASP, .ASPX extensions, all other file extension mapping is not scanned for script or includes. On *nix/Apache the extension must be .shtml. You can use an .htaccess file on Apache to over-ride / enhance this functionality.

We have several Active-X controls installed to facilitate sending email and file transfers ( uploads ). We do NOT support CDO for email except with .NET. The 3rd party controls are far better and much easier to use. All IIS sites have Front Page 2000 extensions or newer installed and ALL FP Bots are supported including email. Please contact our support staff if you have any questions about which objects and documentation for such.

Open Source software Open Source Software and Your Website

We support the efforts of open source software, and many of its authors. We have contributed to many projects both financially and with direct coding efforts. We heartily recommend using open source software on your website! It's a very good thing for you and the world.

With all of this goodness comes some caution. Open source software is widely used, and in a few cases, the projects have contributors that don't pay sufficient attention to security. In addition there's an old axiom that says by the time software is bug free, it's obsolete. [ more ... ] on our policies and suggestions.

We do NOT support Access databases on our web servers. Access is not appropriate for web based applications, and we can't back them up once the web server locks the files. Our Business Class web sites come standard with a SQL Server back end and at least 10 meg of free data space.

All of our IIS hosted web sites are .NET enabled and maintained at the latest version. In addition we have the latest .NET Mobile Controls SDK installed. Between the two, virtually any web enabled device is supported from the conventional DeskTop to a Cell Phone.

We back up every web site and all databases daily. Please let us know if you need something restored. "Best Practices" dictate that you develop OFF-LINE and publish to the production site. This provides you with a backup copy maintained by you, and instantly available. We are here just in case. We can not emphasize strongly enough We only back up databases and web sites once per day. If you store volatile, mission critical data on your site or in your database, best practices dictate that you have some form of local backup or documentation method(s). We do our best to insure against data loss, but we can not guarantee it. We will always recover to the latest backup. Please contact support if you require information regarding our backup schedules.

We Are a RapidSSL, GeoTrust Partner and can help you acquire SSL certificates for your web site at reduced cost. ALL of our web sites are SSL capable.

Front Page:

100% of our IIS sites are FrontPage enabled. While we support the FP extensions, we do NOT provide support for the use of the Front Page Application. Microsoft and several schools, both local and national, provide free and low cost support and classes for this application and it's use. As it's author Microsoft is far more expert at supporting it, and schools are far better at teaching.

Common FP problems include the [Front Page ....] being displayed on your page when using a BOT for form save, email send, discussions, or searches. From the Books On-Line you *must* publish your forms to the web site in order for BOT'S to function properly, simply copying a form to the site won't work, you *must* use the publish functions. Pages with BOT's must be registered with the extensions and FP will actually change the script mapping inside your page based on the specifics of your production web site during the "publish" action. This follows the Microsoft published "best practices" where you develop on a staging server then publish to the production site.

FP shows an error when I have a save data form and I published to the site. The folder where you physically write your data file must be write enabled for the anonymous user or the currently logged in user if it's a secure folder. This can be done via the tools menu on FP or by giving our support staff a call.

Alternate Billing Methods and Credit Cards:

We will gladly arrange for payment via credit card. We have 2 choices currently available. We can bill you via email and payment may be made via check or credit card or we can do conventional automatic credit card payments for your account using Visa / MasterCard / Discover.

Our standard form of invoicing / payment is via credit card, we will gladly arrange for email [* no AOL delivery addresses ] or fax invoicing. All of these services are at no additional charge.*** Contact Support to make arrangements for alternate invoicing. *** Some restrictions apply regarding paper invoicing.

Please always make sure, to include your domain name and invoice number with any payment or correspondence so we can properly identify and credit your account.

Our Billing Policies are HERE .

Our Information Security Policies are HERE .

ALL EAS*Ent.Net users are required to adhere to the terms of the AUP ...