Read the article: Email Services: What are they and what do you need? This was written to clarify all those jargon terms and help you decide what services are right for you.

You may also be interested in this article: The Case For Secure Email, which explains how email is insecure and what features we offer to help mitigate that.

If you have or want to have a domain name of your own, but don’t know what DNS is, you should read: Understanding Domain Name Service (DNS)

There are explicit limits on sending.  These are based on:

• LuxSci’s Acceptable Use Policy which forbids use of our services for bulk or mass emailing of any kind (with the exception of our High Volume service).
• LuxSci’s commitment to keeping our premium hosting servers off of blacklists.

For the High Volume email service, you pay explicitly for your limits.

For premium shared email hosting services, the default limits for each individual user are:

• 300 messages/day via SMTP
• 3000 recipients/day via SMTP
• 1000 recipients/message via SMTP
• 90 recipients/message via WebMail
• No limit on messages/day via WebMail

Note that usage within these limits is monitored by the LuxSci support staff to discover suspicious activity before it can become an issue.

In order to protect our servers from excessive use that may impact performance, we limit each user to checking their POP email no more frequently than once every 30 seconds. This limit does not affect use of IMAP, SMTP, or WebMail.

We take an average of your connection frequency over the period of an hour. If you are exceeding the rate of once every 30 seconds for an few hours, POP connectivity will be temporarily suspended for 15 minutes to 1 hour — until your hourly average rate of successful connections falls back to at most once every 30 seconds.

Most clients find that once every 3-5 minutes is frequent enough for checking their POP email, as email is not an instantaneous medium.

All users can use LDAP to view and query their address books directly from their email clients (like Outlook). This is not synchronization, but a means of directly accessing read only versions of your LuxSci address books from within your email clients.

Outlook users can also use our WebAideSynch Outlook plugin to synchronize address book, calendar, and task data.

Definitely! We provide a web-based application where by you can download email from any number of remote email accounts (i.e. accounts on other servers) to your LuxSci account. This supports any remote account that you can connect to using the POP3 email protocol. This application allows you to preview messages and specify what to download or delete, download without preview, delete messages or leave them on the server, to download from multiple accounts all at once, and to have email download automatically to your LuxSci email folders every 20 minutes.

Note that email downloaded in this fashion can be subject to all anti-Spam or anti-Virus services that you may have with LuxSci!

Yes. All users get versatile address books that can be easily synchronized with Outlook and many other email clients. You can import address book data via CSV file, vCard file, and via our Outlook WebAideSynch plugin.

Certainly. You can send email where the return and from addresses are arbitrary. Using our WebMail application, you can easily send email where the return and from addresses are @anydomain.com, even if the domain is not registered with LuxSci! This is great if you have many different email addresses — you can send email as if it comes from any of them. See: Manage Your Multiple Personalities with Email Signatures.

Note that use of this feature is subject to our acceptable use policy and should not be used for sending Spam or for return or from addresses that do not belong to you (i.e. that are fraudulent). Abuse of this service is grounds for account termination or prosecution.

Yes. These types of devices support connecting to Internet email services via POP or IMAP, and LuxSci has instructions that will help you with their configuration. Checking email with either type of device can be done in such a way that copies of all your email remains on the server so you can also access it via WebMail or via other email programs.

Certainly. You can use any POP or IMAP email program with our servers, even if you have one or more of your own domain names. Those email programs that are built into Apple Mac OSX will work right out of the box. Many of our Mac users use programs like Mail.app, Entourage, and Eudora; we have explicit instructions for setting up these email programs for use with LuxSci.

YES: LuxSci offers a Basic Email Archival option and a Premium Email Archiving option. Our Basic Email Archiving option allows you to archive your incoming and outgoing email for your domain on our servers. Our Premium Email Archiving solution archives incoming and outgoing email on separate servers and those emails cannot be deleted or altered, which can assist in compliancy issues.

No. Aliases accept mail for addresses which do not correspond to any user / email box and then redirect to an actual existing user. As such, aliases are not considered users, do not have their own login, and so do not require additional user licenses. Because of this, you cannot log in to the member’s portal with an alias.

Yes. You will need to change your MX records to point to one of our inbound email servers (you will be told what server names to use once you sign up). We can also manage your DNS for you and provide several levels of backup inbound email servers.

Yes we do. If you order “SMTP Relaying” services, you can send email to anyone using LuxSci’s SMTP servers, whether you are using our WebMail or your own email program (like Outlook). In order to prevent our servers from being used for sending Spam, we only relay email from authorized users — you must specify your username and password when connecting to our SMTP server.

All clients can send email from WebMail, even if they have not purchased “SMTP Relaying” services.

Read more about SMTP Services and our Anonymous SMTP Service.

LuxSci also has a “High Volume” service for sending large numbers of messages outbound via SMTP.

Yes. The web-configurable email forwarding, alias, and catch-all alias features allow you to redirect each message to up to 25 destination email addresses. Larger distribution lists are available by upgrade (and are free in some cases, i.e. if you order Email Defense as well), contact Sales for more information.

• You can host any or all of the domains with us and have your email delivered to one or more LuxSci email boxes.
• You can send email from your LuxSci account in such a way that it appears to the recipient(s) to be from any of your other accounts using our smart signatures [even if some of these are not hosted by LuxSci].
• You can easily view and download email from your other (POP3) accounts to LuxSci using our POP Downloader.
• You can have your email forwarded to or from your LuxSci email boxes.

No. LuxSci does not support “telnet” or SSH for security reasons. As such, it would not be possible to access your email through a telnet or SSH session to one of LuxSci’s servers. You can, however, access your email using WebMail or any email program supporting POP or IMAP, assuming you have subscribed to these services at LuxSci.

Not really. You can have as many users or email boxes as you like in your account sharing the same overall disk quota. Each email box or user corresponds to a login to LuxSci.

We limit email aliases to 100 + 10 for each user in your account, so 100 + (users x 10), though this limit can be increased upon request. You can send and receive email for these aliases. You can even have catch-all aliases where email for any user of your domain for whom there is no alias gets sent to some specified user. LuxSci provides online tools with which you can manage your email aliases.

Yes. WebMail and IMAP are fully integrated — they use the same email folders. WebMail even supports delete/expunge cycles like IMAP does. This is perfect for people on the go who need to check their email from lots of different places.

A “User” represents a distinct login to LuxSci and separate space for email or other services. This login provides individual access to WebMail, FTP, POP, IMAP, and SMTP. Typically, each person who needs individual email access will be a “user”. Each LuxSci account comes with at least one user; the cost of additional users depends on which services they will be entitled to utilize. You can add additional users to your account at any time through the LuxSci member’s web site. See our price list for detailed pricing.

If you have your own domain name, you can have more email addresses than users because you can set up an arbitrary number of “email aliases” which forward email from any specified email address at your domain to your actual users. So, you might not need separate users for addresses like “info,” “webmaster,” “sales,” etc. You can send and receive email for these aliases from any user you wish. This is one difference between our service and other services that offer 10 or 100 POP email accounts. We give you unlimited aliases to cover all the various addresses you may need, and charge only for actual users.

You can also have a “catch-all” email address for your domain(s) where all email sent to anyone your domain who is not defined by an explicit user or alias is forwarded to address(es) of your choice. All aliases can be managed through online tools in the LuxSci member’s web site.

In our standard shared hosting environment, we impose limits on the number of concurrent (simultaneous) connections to email services. This is to ensure our servers perform at optimal performance for all customers, to prevent any one client from causing degredation due to making a significant number of concurrent connections. These limits are:

• POP concurrent connection limit*: 10
• IMAP concurrent connection limit*: 50
• SMTP concurrent connection limit: 10

What happens if I reach these limits?

1. Exceeding the SMTP limit will cause refused SMTP connections
2. Exceeding the POP limit will cause the oldest POP connections to be auto-terminated
3. Exceeding the IMAP limit either excessively or for more than a few minutes will cause the oldest IMAP processes to be auto-terminated (i.e. a short spike in connections will not be penalized unless it is a very large spike).

* These limits can be adjusted on a user or account basis if there is a legitimate business need. An additional cost may be involved.

For shared Basic and Premium High Volume accounts, the SMTP concurrent connection limit is 25.

For dedicated Basic and Premium High Volume servers, there is no specific SMTP limit, only what the hardware can handle.

Yes. Your account administrator can create a Global Address Book for use by all of your users for no additional cost. To share with only certain users, though, you will need a Premium WebAide license.

Our email system has an upper limit of 100 MB on the total encoded size of any individual email message sent or received. Sending of email messages from WebMail is further limited to containing attachments totaling no more than 50 MB in raw size. Messages larger than this will be rejected and are really too big to be sent as email anyway and should be communicated via FTP or some other mechanism.