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Q1 |
How come Arrowmail's Webmail works differently to other Exchange OWA systems? |
A1 |
To access standard Outlook Web Access (OWA), in Internet
Explorer's Address Bar, you usually have to type something like:-
https://exchange.mycompany.com/exchange
In our system you only need type:-
arrowmail.co.uk (no prefixes or suffixes!)
You could, if you wanted, type:-
http://owa.arrowmail.co.uk/exchange
https://exchange.arrowmail.co.uk/exchange works too but gets you a plainer logon screen.
Also, when you come to enter your username, you usually have to
prefix it with your domain's Netbios name such as:-
mycompanydomain\john.smith
while in our system just your username will do.
You can use
your primary email address in place of your username, but your
username usually requires less typing.
Why the differences?
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To save you typing |
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To save us having to explain to people, unfamiliar
with OWA, why things don't work the simple, obvious way |
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To lessen the opportunity for errors |
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It's not magic, it's just some redirection tricks in IIS6 and
a bit of editing of the OWA logon page. (We couldn't resist
adding our branding to the logon page as well.)
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Q2 |
Can I continue to use my current email addresses if I change to your system? |
A2 |
Yes, absolutely!
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You can setup forwarding of email from existing accounts to your Arrowmail mailbox. |
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You can have email automatically collected, by our server, from your POP3 accounts. |
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If you own your own domain name, you can nominate
our servers to be responsible for all email sent to your domain via MX records.
The process of changing MX records can be daunting, so let us know you domain registrant's
control panel logon details and we'll change the MX records for you, if you like. |
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We'll also throw in an @arrowmail.co.uk
or @arrowmail.co email address if you want. |
Once you've paid your first year's
subscription we'll buy, pay the first 2 years' fees and setup a
.CO.UK domain for you so you can have email addresses and a website at that domain name.
We use the domain registry service at
www.easyspace.co.uk
There are some more detailed examples
here of how multiple email
accounts, from different service providers, can be centralised into your Arrowmail mailbox.
You can also nominate which of your email addresses will appear, by default, as the "From" header for
every email you send and also setup alternative "From" addresses
yourself, if necessary, inside Outlook and give each "From" address
it's own signature - here's how.
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Q3 |
What do I do when Spam gets through to my Inbox? |
A3 |
I'm sorry to say that this will continue to
happen until the various anti-spam initiatives, currently
proposed, are agreed upon and universally adopted.
Maybe
spam won't exist in 5 years, although, according to Bill Gates'
prediction of a few years ago, it shouldn't exist today:-
"Spam will be a thing of the past in 2 years' time." - January 24th 2004.
The evil geniuses behind spam are constantly changing course to evade anti-spam systems which are
always having to play catch-up.
When a spam email makes it through our filters and arrives in your inbox you can:-
1 - |
Ignore It
Chances are
that our "spam trap" accounts will have also received the same item and it's already been fed back into our
Spam Filter for analysis as to how it managed to get through in the first place.
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2 - |
If the spam has an
Unsubscribe link decide if you trust it
If the
product being advertised is:-
a) |
Not a typical dodgy spam product such as pornography, mortgages, phoney
qualifications, body part enhancement, pharmaceutical drugs or stocks and shares advice |
b) |
It doesn't have a paragraph of nonsense words designed to fool spam filters |
c) |
It's correctly addressed to you |
Then it may not be
mainstream spam.
If the company behind it is based in
the UK (prices shown are in £s) then they have a legal obligation to provide a way for you to be taken off their mailing list.
The law is called the
Privacy and Electronic Commerce Statutory Instrument
2003, No. 2426
I guess that 30% of what people
consider to be spam can be stopped by following the
unsubscribe process at the bottom of the email, so it's
worth trying this if the spam appears to have originated
in the UK.
My experience is that many companies do now
act on requests to unsubscribe from their mailing lists.
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Forward the email to
us to feed to our Spam Learning system
You should do this
if the same spam has made it to your inbox repeatedly over several days.
You need to forward the email to us in a special way so its original format is preserved.
Instructions on how to do this in Outlook and Outlook
Express are given here.
The spam emails you forward to us don't go straight into
the spam learning system as our existing set of spam
definition rules are too precious for us to risk being polluted.
We review the spam you send us before
letting it through, so if you were to send us Tesco or
Amazon newsletters as spam we'd reject them as some
people do wish to receive these and we know that these
companies honour unsubscribe requests.
The address to forward your spam to is:-
isspam@arrowmail.co.uk |
Our spam classification system inserts it's report into the
headers of each email that it processes to show how the Spam
Index it has assigned was arrived at.
You may gain some insight into what causes emails to be
classified as spam by examining these headers.
To see these headers in Outlook 2003, open an email and click on View - Options
This option is not available with Outlook 2007.
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Q4 |
What do I do when I find a Genuine Email in my Junk E-mail folder? |
A4 |
We feel bad when this happens but hopefully it's
a rare occurrence.
Forward the email to us for feeding back to
our Spam Learning system so that it can workout where it went
wrong.
You need to forward the email to us in a special way so its original format is preserved.
Instructions on how to do this in Outlook and Outlook Express are here.
The address to forward your false positives to is:-
notspam@arrowmail.co.uk
To stop your outgoing emails being classified as Spam by other, heavy-handed
anti-spam systems you should write your emails in a non-spammy way.
Of course, some of the spammers use these techniques
themselves but generally they still help:-
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Don't write words in all capitals or use
excessive multiple exclamation or question marks. |
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Send your emails as plain text instead of HTML formatted emails. |
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Don't send emails with blank Subject lines.
Try to
use at least 4 words to describe the subject of your
email. |
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When you send an attachment, make sure you still put
a few word in the body of the email.
Send a pictures
or graphics as JPGs and never GIFs. |
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Q5 |
I've never used Outlook or Exchange before.
Can you explain
what the advantages and disadvantages are over my current POP3
Outlook Express or Hotmail account? |
A5 |
Advantages:-
| 1 - |
With Outlook and Exchange the master copy of all your
email data is kept on our servers.
A backup copy is also
automatically stored on each PC on which you use Outlook.
These
backups are kept up-to-date every time you use Outlook, without you having to do anything.
If your laptop is stolen, your PC's hard drive fails or our
servers suffer some disaster then your email data is not lost. |
| 2 - |
If you don't finish writing an email at work, just
save it in your Drafts folder and, when you open outlook on your
home PC, you'll find it sitting there in your Drafts folder
waiting for you to complete it.
Because your email is stored centrally on our
servers, you always see the same set of folders wherever you
access your email.
No more forwarding emails to yourself or not
being able to access an email because the only copy is stored on a PC in a different location.
We call this "fully synchronised email". |
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Outlook is more than an email client, it's also a Personal Information Manager (PIM).
This means that, alongside email data, are stored Contacts
(address book information), a Calendar for appointments that
gives you reminders of impending events, a To Do list, a place
for general Notes and a Journal.
You can also store
normal files such as Word documents within Outlook's
folders.
All of this data is kept synchronised and therefore backed up, between
our servers and all the PCs you use Outlook on. |
| 4 - |
Any PC, including Macs, that have Internet access can be
used to access and work on your Outlook data via a webmail
interface using any Internet browser program.
Wherever you are you are in the world, if you can get to
a PC with Internet access you are only a username and
password away from your email and other important data. |
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Many mobile phones have the ability to synchronise with
Outlook or Exchange to varying degrees - it's called ActiveSync.
Simpler devices might
only be able to show the 30 most recent emails in your Inbox
while modern Smartphones and PDAs can do Direct Push where new
emails are sent to your device automatically, as soon as they
arrive on the server.
The Blackberry is
the most famous example of a Push Email device although now many
other modern mobile devices can manage this trick.
Exchange can
now push emails to these mobile devices directly and so achieve
Blackberry-like functionality.
Direct Push is enabled, by default, on every Arrowmail Exchange mailbox account |
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Groups of users can share common contacts, calendars and
email folders.
Members of the group can see when others are
free, add events to another person's calendar, send meetings requests and book meeting rooms.
Outlook and Exchange can therefore improve communications between members of a workgroup. |
Disadvantages:-
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Outlook is not a free program and has to be purchased
separately from your copy of Windows.
Outlook does, however,
come included with all editions of Microsoft Office 2003 and all
Office 2007 Suites except the Home and Student suite.
Exchange server can cost many £1000s to implement plus further
ongoing costs to maintain and administer.
Alternatively you can
rent Exchange mailboxes from email hosting companies, such as Arrowmail, for a monthly fee. |
| 2 - |
Outlook Express is a simpler program that puts less
strain on your PC's system resources.
On older PCs, Outlook can
be slow to load and sluggish in operation. |
| 3 - |
Outlook 2003 is a poor client for IMAP email accounts
(Outlook 2007 is better.) |
| 4 - |
Outlook does a good job wh / operating on slower Internet
connections, such as GPRS, but Outlook Express is better in these situations as it requires the
least amount or data to be transferred for it to work.
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Q6 |
If all your anti-virus and anti-spam protection is on the
front-end servers, how do you protect internal users from
getting virus and
spam emails from other internal users? |
A6 |
We can't discount the possibility of a virus email
originating from an internal user and going straight to another
internal user's mailbox and so our backend Exchange servers have
an anti-virus plug-in.
This will also pickup virus emails when
a user imports an existing email store, such as a PST file, into their Exchange mailbox.
We only pass emails that are incoming from the Internet through our spam filter.
We're paranoid about keeping our servers as trusted sources of
genuine email and off of all black-lists and so, believe me,
no one will be
able to send spam from one of our internal accounts for very long.
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Q7 |
How do I change my password for the Arrowmail email system? |
A7 |
Users can change their own password from within Outlook Web
Access (OWA) which is the webmail interface to your Arrowmail
account.
Type this address in a web browser:-
https://owa.arrowmail.co.uk/exchange
or just arrowmail.co.uk with no prefix,
and enter your username and current password to logon.
Click on the Options button in the bottom left and
scroll down until you see the
Change Password button:-
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and then complete the pop-up form similarly to below:-
This username and password are the same ones that are used for all other
forms of access to Arrowmail's services, including Outlook Anywhere, VPN,
FTP,
Web Folders and Mapped Drive.
The only password requirement we've setup is that it has a
minimum length of 6 characters.
We recommend you choose a password with a least 8 characters
which includes
mixed-case letters, a couple of numbers and a punctuation symbol.
You do, of course, have to know your current password in order
to use the above methods to change it.
If you've forgotten your password, see the next question.
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Q8 |
What do I do if I can't remember my Arrowmail password? |
A8 |
Phone us on 0800 634 9870, or +44 20 3266 0015 from outside the UK, and
we'll ask you some security question to conform your identity before resetting
your password.
We'll then send the new password to your mobile phone in a text message.
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Q9 |
Can I connect to your Exchange server if I don't
have
Windows XP/Vista and Outlook 2003/2007? |
A9 |
You need both Windows XP (or later) and Office 2003
(or later) to do the
Outlook Anywhere trick which is
required to have access to all the features of Exchange.
You can access our
Exchange server using all other standard email protocols such as
POP3, SMTP and IMAP but these don't allow you to use the
advanced features of Exchange.
You can also access your
mailbox with any browser on any type of computer with Internet
access using Outlook Web Access which allows access to most of the advanced
features, but OWA isn't as nice as real Outlook.
When Outlook and Exchange are
on the same internal network they communicate using the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol and this
has been the case with all previous versions of Outlook.
RPC
is not a protocol that is allowed through firewalls, onto the
Internet which is the reason Microsoft developed RPC-over-HTTP,
the protocol behind Outlook Anywhere.
Only Outlook 2003 and later can make Outlook Anywhere connections.
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Q10 |
I have a Mac, Can I make use of your system's advanced email features? |
A10 |
Our Exchange mailboxes allow POP3 and SMTP
access but this is not very advanced.
Most email programs that
run on a Mac support the IMAP email protocol.
You may not have heard much about IMAP but it was designed to
overcome the disadvantages of POP3 which are:-
1 - |
Because a particular email only exists on one PC it can only be accessed from that PC |
2 - |
As email data exists only on one PC, it can easily be lost through some mishap with that PC. |
With an IMAP account, the master copy of your email folders
are kept "safe" on our servers and any email client is kept in
sync with the master copy while it's connected.
You therefore see exactly the same folders from whatever PC
you read email on and having a PC lost, stolen or a hard drive
crash will not make you lose your email.
Outlook Web Access will work with all modern browsers that run
on a Mac, such as Safari, and the program called Entourage,
which is part of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac, can interface
with Exchange in a similar way to Outlook.
They don't make Mac Smartphones so a Mac owner has the same choices
of Smartphones as everyone else and most of these mobile devices
are capable of synchronising directly with an Exchange server and receiving emails by Direct Push.
For this to work the SmartPhone must have an ActiveSync client.
You don't have to get a Smartphone based on Windows Mobile 5
or 6, as DataViz sell
a product called
RoadSync for US$99.99 which enable most smartphones to have
Push email from our servers.
If you have the choice, however,
choosing a Smartphone with "native" support for ActiveSync makes more sense.
Without Entourage or Microsoft Outlook, Mac users won't enjoy the benefit
of the PIM features and the ability to share scheduling
information within a workgroup, but, by themselves, synchronised email folders
and Direct Push to a smartphone can revolutionise your email experience.
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Q11 |
When I try to edit my Rules in Outlook, why do I get an error message? |
A11 |
This is the typical error message:-
There is not enough space on the Microsoft Exchange Server to store
all of your rules. The rules that failed to upload have been deactivated.
This means that the rule you are trying to add or edit will push
the space required to store all your rules past the limit of
32kbytes per mailbox.
This limit comes from the amount of
data that can fit into a single Remote Procedure Call message and it
can't be circumvented in Exchange 2003.
In Exchange 2007 this limit can be increased up to a maximum of 256kbytes
thus allowing 8x as many rules to be stored.
Arrowmail plans to offer Exchange 2007 mailboxes, in the not
too distant future, configured, of course, with the maximum storage allowance for Rules.
If you're desperate to increase this limit now, there's a 3rd party product called
Clear Context Information System that might help.
Even the simplest rule uses 660 bytes so about 50 rules is
the most you'll be able to have. This figure could be much less
if you have some complicated rules.
Otherwise here are some other suggestions:-
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See if any other rules can be deleted |
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See if 2 or more rules can be incorporated into a
single rule |
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See if you can change any rules to make them more
compact.
For example, if you are moving a message to a
PST file, relocate the PST file to a location on your
hard drive with the shortest possible pathname:-
C:\Archive.pst occupies less storage space than:-
C:\Documents and
Settings\john.smith\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst |
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If one of your rules is to forward every message
that arrives in your Inbox to another email address, you
can use the Customer Request Form to ask us to make this
setting on the server which uses a different mechanism to
Rules. |
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Q12 |
How can I request a change to my account's configuration? |
A12 |
Email us the changes you want to info@arrowmail.co.uk.
Use your Exchange mailbox to send this email so we'll know that the request is genuine
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Q13 |
I've setup multiple accounts in Outlook, with
different signatures, but they're not working properly. What should I do? |
A13 |
Information on how to work with multiple
accounts, each with a different signature, is given
here.
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Q14 |
How can I find out how much of my Mailbox Storage
Space I'm using? |
A14 |
From within Outlook, right-click on the top-level folder
of your Exchange mailbox - called Mailbox - John Smith - and chose
Properties for "Mailbox - John Smith" then select Folder Size..
This gives a window with 2 tabs: Local Data and Server Data.
Local Data is the size of the OST file stored on your local
PC and Server Data is the amount of storage you are using on our Exchange server.
When the local copy of Outlook has fully synchronised with
the server, the amounts of Local Data and Server Data should be
the same. In practice the Local Data amount is usually a little
bit higher due to synchronization errors that have happened in the past.
As well as a total amount of storage being used, this page
shows a breakdown of how much storage space each folder is using.
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Q15 |
My Mobile Device is a Blackberry, can I use your system for my Email? |
A15 |
Our Exchange server doesn't have a direct way to
synchronise with your Blackberry account, such as is provided
by the Blackberry Enterprise Server.
However, Blackberry provides simpler methods for new emails that
arrive in your Inbox to be pushed to a Blackberry device, such
as using POP3 or Webmail, and our Exchange server certainly supports all of these.
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Q16 |
Why is my signature double-spaced on HTML emails I send using Outlook? |
A16 |
There's a discrepancy in how the Outlook Signature Editor
creates the HTML code for a signature and how Outlook interprets
this HTML code when displaying an email with a signature.
Specifically, the </p> tag, used to signify a new
line, generates an extra line break, hence the double-spacing problem.
The solution is to use a <br> tag for new lines
instead or </p>.
How do you do that?
In the Outlook signature editor, when you want a new line,
don't press Enter but, instead, press Shift+Enter.
If you already have a signature that's "double-spacing", open
it in the Outlook editor and move the cursor to the start of
each line (except the first line), press Backspace to
delete the existing tag and then press Shift+Enter to
generate a new <br> tag.
In the editor it will look exactly the same, but the
double-spacing between lines will have gone when emails you
write are displayed in the recipient's Outlook.
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