Our SMTP server (for sending mail) is : mail.ukfsn.org

Our POP3 server (for incoming mail) is: mail.ukfsn.org

Our IMAP server (for incoming mail) is: mail.ukfsn.org

The email server supports encryption using SSL/TLS so you are welcome to set this up in your email client software.

Your have a choice of how you quote your email address. All email to username@ukfsn.org and @username.ukfsn.org will be delivered to your mailbox.

username is your login name which you selected during registration.
represents anything you like - eg. projects@username.ukfsn.org, news@username.ukfsn.org, etc. This provides you with a useful mechanism for tracking who is sending you email. By using a unique address when filling in webforms for example you can determine who is selling on your details without your permission.

In addition to this you can set up separate mailboxes under your account if you need to completely separate out email for a specific address. See below for details.

Mailbox and message size limits

There is a maximum size limit of 30MB on each message sent to or from our servers. Note that binary attachments actually use 30% more space than the file size due to encoding.

Your mailbox is limited to 100MB. If your mailbox reaches this limit our mail servers will refuse to accept further email for you.

Webmail

Our Webmail service offers an easy to use web interface to your @ukfsn.org email. You can access the Webmail service by clicking on the WebMail link.

Sending Email

As a security measure we require that you be connected via our ADSL broadband service or dialled into our 0845 local rate access numbers in order to send email via our server.

If you need to send email via our server from another type of connection - ie from an internet connection via another provider or in another country - you will need to use authentication to send the email. Please see the configuration documentation for your email software to determine how to do this.

If you find that you cannot connect to our server from an internet connection it may be because the ISP or network you are connecting through blocks access to port 25 (the email sending smtp port) in which case you can set your software to use port 587 instead.

Receiving Email

When we receive email addressed to your email address we store it for you in a mailbox on our mail server. To access you email you need to set up your email software to access our server using the IMAP or POP3 protocol.

The settings you need for this are:

IMAP or POP3 server as detailed above.

Login: Your account login name without the @ukfsn.org
Password: Your ukfsn.org account password.

We strongly recommend that you install anti-virus software on any systems that you use to access email and keep the anti-virus software definitions up to date.

Please note that you must be dialled into our network via our access numbers in order to access your email except where you have paid a subscription for your ukfsn.org membership.

Using separate mailboxes under your account

By default all email addressed to your account including any hosted domains is delivered into your main account mailbox - ie anything@yourname.ukfsn.org and anything@yourdomain.net is delivered into the yourname mailbox (where yourname is your UKFSN account name).

All such messages contain a header entry X-Original-To: which details who the email was addressed to thus allowing you to download a single mailbox and easily sort it locally.

If however you need to completely separate a specific email address you can do so by creating a separate mailbox for the address.

To do this you need to access the MyAccount service and select the Add Mailbox option from the menu. Then just enter the required details as per the form. As soon as the MyAccount facility returns confirmation that the mailbox has been created you can use it.

To log in to one of these separate mailboxes you need to use the following settings:

IMAP/POP3 Server:mail.ukfsn.org
Login Name: mailbox@domain.net [ie the full email address for the mailbox]
Password: [the password you set for this mailbox]

Do remember that if you are not paying a subscription for your UKFSN account you will still need to be dialled in to our access numbers in order to access the service.

SPAM - Unsolicited Junk Email

Probably the biggest problem facing the Internet today is SPAM. Unsolicited Junk Email wastes enormous amounts of Internet bandwidth, disk space and, most importantly time.

It costs you money.

This is the only form of "marketing" which forces those who receive it to pay for the "privilege". We consider this to be a serious problem and we do not tolerate it.

Our Terms and Conditions, which you accepted and agreed to be bound by when you signed up to the service, specifically forbid sending such messages and specify a severe penalty which you will be liable for should you abuse your account in this manner. If you have not properly read our Terms and Conditions please do so.

Just as we don't tolerate people sending SPAM out from our network we don't tolerate it being sent to our network either. We operate a combination of blocklists to prevent spam being sent to ukfsn.org accounts. The first of these is a straight forward block on all email from any system on the Internet that is known to be an Open Relay. An Open Relay is a mail server on the Internet that will accept email from anywhere and send it to any destination that is not local to it.

Secondly we maintain a database of sites from which we have previously received direct SPAM. Where we have previously received SPAM from a server and we can comprehensively determine that the message originated from that server we block all further email from that server. We do provide a mechanism whereby the people responsible for such systems can have them removed from our blacklist however we have so far never had a system in the list that should not be there.

What to do if you receive SPAM email
Firstly do not ever reply to a SPAM email message. This simply confirms that your email address is valid and thus results in the person who sent it selling your address to many other similar abusers.

What you should do is to check the SMTP headers of the message and try to determine where it actually originated from. The From: header is totally worthless in this as it is easily faked.

To trace where an email message originated from you need to read the "Received From" headers which are listed in reverse order of the systems that have handled the message. The last system that handled the email before you downloaded it was our mail server. Our mail server always notes the IP address of the server that passed a message to it for you. That is the only piece of information that we believe is reliable. If that IP address indicates that the system belongs to a European or American ISP it is usually a good idea to report the incident to that ISP directly as they are the only ones who can actually accomplish anything useful (like getting rid of the spammer).

Where the message originates from other areas it is often ineffective to complain in this manner however it is still worth a try.

Please do remember when reporting abuse that not everyone speaks English - even on the Internet. If you are able to, write your complaint both in English and in the language that is spoken in the locale of that ISP. There are sites on the Internet that offer free translation services where you can type in the text of your complaint and the site will produce a translation of it. Do note that these are not perfect however even a poorly translated complaint is far more likely to be effective. One such site is AltaVista.

Finally remember that to be able to do anything about your complaint the ISP you send it to will need a copy of the email with the full headers included. By default email software does not show the full headers of an email message but a very abbreviated selection of them only. You will need to change the settings of your software to display the full headers to the message prior to copying it into your complaint notice.

SPAM and Virus Filters

We offer filtering facilities to allow you to tag and, optionally, block spam and viruses in your email.

Our virus filters block over 22,000 viruses. Click here for a list of the virus signatures our filters can block.

These facilities allow you to set filtering rules on a per address basis or a per domain basis and allow you to chose the levels at which action will be taken if a message matches the spam detection checks.

By default these filters are disabled for your account. If you wish to activate them you will need to turn on the filtering and set your detection and filtering preferences using our MyAccount control panel.

Simple guide to our Anti-SPAM/Anti-VIRUS filters

The filters are based upon SpamAssassin scoring and ClamAV for anti-virus protection.

You can choose to employ both anti-spam and anti-virus facilities on your email or just one or even no filtering at all if you prefer. By default no filtering is active on your email.

You can filter either on a single email address or you can choose to filter all email to a domain hosted under your account (including the @username.ukfsn.org subdomain).

To set up email filtering you select the "Add New Filter" option from the Email Filters section of the menu in the MyAccount control panel.

If you wish to filter viruses out of your email all you need to do is to select the "Filter Viruses" checkbox from the list of options. Any virus infected email arriving to your mailbox will be dropped by our server.

If you wish to filter SPAM from your email you have a little more choice in how to treat you mail. Firstly you need to select the "Filter SPAM" option to enable the anti-spam features - if you don't do this nothing else you enter for the anti-spam options will take effect.

Once you choose to filter SPAM you will need to set the options to set how sensitive you want our filters to be:

The "Add X-Spam Header Level:" option will simply add headers to an email that matches SpamAssassins checks indicating that the message is likely to be spam and providing an indication of how "spammy" the message seems.

Generally you can set this to a fairly low value (eg. 2).

The "Class as SPAM Level:" is used to determine whether or not to add a SPAM indicator to the subject of the email if you have selected that option.

It's advisable to set this a little higher than the previous option (eg. 3 or 4).

The "Kill SPAM Level:" option is the only one that will result in a message being deleted on our servers. Accordingly you should not set this too low - generally I'd advise against setting it lower than 7 unless you are *very* sure that you don't mind the possibility of legitimate email being lost.

If you wish to disable one of these options but use the others - ie you want to tag messages but never to drop them - simply set the option you don't want to the value 999

The "SPAM Modify Subject:" is used in association with the "Class as SPAM level" option and will result in the following being prepended to the subject line of all email scoring at that level or higher ****SPAM****. This is very useful for easy identification of likely spam in your mail client or to allow you to employ POP3 client filters easily.