If we provide your email you can read it online using the supplied username and password at our webmail application.

To read or download your email in a desktop application we recommend Mozilla Thunderbird. You'll need to choose whether you want to read your email on one or more devices.

If you want to download all your email onto your current computer, choose "POP3" as the incoming account type when you set up your account. In this case you will not be able to read your email on more than one computer, mobile phone, or tablet, or use our webmail application.

To share your email between more than one device or between your device and our webmail application, choose "IMAP" as the incoming account type. In this case changes you make from any device or the webmail application (such as deleting or sending email) will affect other places you read your email. Bear in mind that your email account includes a limited quota. If you choose to use IMAP any emails you do not delete from your account will count towards your quota.

If you use Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, Evolution, KMail, or Kontact, your account details are configured automatically by entering your email address in the account setup, and you do not need to enter the server names, ports, or your username manually.

For other mail readers, including mobile phones, you may need to manually enter the details:

If you experience any problems with setup, please email gary@praterraines.co.uk or call 01303 905 245 during office hours.

Filtering and Spam Prevention

We filter all incoming email for spam and viruses, whether the final recipient is a local mailbox or the mail will be redirected to another provider. As a result we currently reject around 1,650,000 spam and malware emails a week (about 98% of all incoming messages). Because all our mail is received through the same servers, and the filtering is server-wide, you cannot completely opt out of our spam and virus filtering service. Filtering is a multi-stage process:

• We try to validate the sending mailserver’s IP address against its stated hostname. If they do not match, we tell the mailserver to try again later. Most spam senders will never reconnect, but all legitimate servers should retry sending the message at intervals for at least four days. This technique is known as greylisting. This technique keeps roughly 450,000 junk mails a week out of our clients’ inboxes.

• We maintain a (short) blacklist of email and IP addresses known to send spam and reject all incoming email from these addresses.

• If the sending domain has published an SPF record, we reject any mail from hosts forbidden to send on behalf of the domain. We reject around 200,000 emails a week based on this check.

• We scan all messages for viruses before accepting them. Our anti-virus software is updated daily overnight and includes common phishing emails in addition to viruses. About 40,000 viruses are trapped a week.

• Finally we scan the message text for spam using content-matching rules which are also updated daily, rejecting a further 300,000 spam messages a week as a result.

If we provide your domain name, we add an SPF record to your domain as standard. This record publishes information about which mail servers are permitted to send mail from your domain, and reduces spam sent by other servers claiming to be from your email address. If you want to send mail from your domain without using our servers (for example, from a mail server in your office), you should let us know so we can update the record. If we redirect email for you, we use SRS to ensure your legitimate email is not rejected by your ISP.