Daily Data’s shared web hosting comes with shared mail service for clients, with built in spam and virus checking.
Our service is designed for normal communication between users and their correspondents. However, our shared mail server is not designed to allow mailing lists for marketing or other purposes. In order to use a marketing or other mailing list, please contact us. In many cases, we can set up a small mailing list for you, while in others we may recommend you either upgrade to a virtual/dedicated server, or request you use one of the several commercial mailing list servers.
Inactive E-Mail Accounts
Mail in our shared service must be “active,” meaning we expect mail to normally be checked each day.
Any email account which is not checked at least once in any 30 day period will be considered inactive. We will attempt to contact the owner of these accounts and, if unsuccessful, retain the option to disallow sending or receiving of mail until the problem is resolved. If the problem can not be resolved within an additional 30 day period, we may, at our discretion, archive your e-mail and delete the account. If you fail to contact us within one calendar year, the archive may be irretrievably deleted.
Large Mailbox Folders
Mailboxes with a large number of messages in a particular folder are very difficult for the server to host. We request mail be sorted into multiple folders where feasible to allow our server to work at maximum efficiency for you. The choice of how to structure your mail (by date, by client, by project) is up to you, but we will be happy to help you find a process which works for your particular situation.
Some e-mail clients, most notably Microsoft Outlook, have problems when the INBOX folder has a large number of messages, and you may experience issues such as a slowdown of your computer or even “lost” mail. This does not seem to affect other folders besides the INBOX on Outlook. Contact us if you want to know more about this issue.
Based on this, we recommend you move mail out of your INBOX and into subfolders when possible, trying to keep your INBOX with less than 1000 messages in it (500 is recommended). All other folders should have a few thousand e-mails at any one time. If you exceed this, you may find a significant pause of several seconds, or even minutes, when checking a particular folder.
Using Third Party mail service
In some cases, clients prefer to use a third party mail service such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail or other service. These services generally allow you to pull mail from your Daily Data e-mail account, and Daily Data has the ability to automatically forward received mail to these accounts for you.
Daily Data understands that some third party services allow easier access to other, useful tools (such as Google’s “Google Docs” or Chat). We recommend you use POP and Delete (aka “pull”) when you set this up. Feel free to contact us for assistance in setting up these third party services.
Pulling mail without deleting them on the Daily Data server, or forwarding from Daily Data can cause the issues when using a third party mail service.
Full INBOX
If you elect to have Daily Data store your email on our server and forward to a third party server (or POP without deleting), the mail on the Daily Data server can grow until it causes serious problems, for you and others using our servers.
During normal mail service, there is a little housekeeping people perform; spam is deleted, read e-mail is sorted into folders for easy retrieval, and old mail is deleted. If you never log into your Daily Data account and performing these actions, your INBOX can become very full (in some cases we have seen the size grow to over 70,000 e-mails over a period of years). As mentioned above, anything over 1,000 e-mails can cause the server to slow for everyone using our service, and so is unfair to our other e-mail clients.
Third Party Mail Servers downgrading Daily Data servers due to number of messages coming from it.
If you elect to have mail forwarded to your third party account, either “Pure Forward” (it never touches the Daily Data storage) or “Store and Forward” (we keep a copy, but send a copy to your third party service), the remote server can begin to suspect Daily Data of being a spam engine. In many cases, the remote server will limit the number of messages coming from Daily Data servers or, in extreme cases, deny access outright.
This situation can slow, or stop, your e-mail from arriving at your third party mail service, and even worse, mark other clients of the shared mail service we provide as spammers.
To avoid this, we recommend mail be “pulled” by the remote service instead of being forwarded from Daily Data.
Policy on third party mail services
In order to ensure all of our clients have the best experience possible, an automate system will detect accounts which are not having regular housekeeping. If such an account is found, mail older than 30 days will be archived into compressed storage. Retrieving mail will require manual intervention by a Daily Data technician.
Additionally, if our logs show we are being slowed, or blocked, due to mail being forwarded to a third party mail server, we may disable the forwarding until the situation is resolved. Mail will still be stored on the Daily Data servers, but will not arrive at your preferred third party service.