Red Cube Hosting

We have just put the latest version of our webmail system live. This version is a significant update, and includes some long-outstanding features (marking email as read/unread) as well as some useful enhancements such as HTML message message composition and a preview pane.

We’ve also made further improvements to our spam filtering system over the last few days. Initial indications are that the new filtering we have put in place has made a significant improvement to our “hit rate” so we are now rejecting (rather than tagging - emails that arrive with *** SPAM *** prepended to the subject line) more spam than ever.

All our hosting packages include the following features as standard:

General Features
Hosted on very fast, reliable Linux servers.
Choice of managed or self managed service.
Email and telephone support.
Powerful control panel to manage your account, domains (including DNS), email users and much more.

Email Features
POP3 or IMAP mailboxes - or SMTP delivery direct to your own mail server (some of the features below are only available for POP3/IMAP).
Email forwarding and “out of office” messages.
Virus scanning of email.
Powerful spam checking and tagging of email.
Phishing/scam email scanning.
Control panel for each email user to allow setting of personal options.
Webmail for access to email out of the office.
Set individual quotas for your email users.
Optional catchall mailbox.
Create and manage mailing lists or distribution lists.

Web Features
Add and manage sub-domains though the control panel.
Domain aliases.
Add and manage separate FTP users (for web designers etc).
PHP5 and CGI support.
MySQL databases (with control panel access).
Comprehensive statistics

We offer two different ways for you to access your email - via POP or IMAP. This article explains how each works, and gives some guidelines as to which is likely to be best for you.

POP (Post Office Protocol v3 or POP3)

POP downloads email from a single folder - your Inbox. When you check your email in your mail program, it downloads the email from the server to your local computer. In most email programs, you can choose to leave the email on the server for a a number of days so you could choose to leave mail on the server for 30 days and then use our webmail to see recent email and new email when you are away from your computer. As email is moved from the hosting servers to your computers each time you check your email, it does’t use up as much of your hosting space.

POP is ideal if:

you read/reply to your email on one computer most of the time.
if you have very high volumes of email (particularly email with attachments).
you use dial up, or a pay-as-you-go internet service provider.
you only want to look new/recent email via webmail.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol v4 or IMAP4)

When you access your email using IMAP, it remains stored on the server in multiple folders (including folders you can create yourself, and your sent items). This means that you can connect to the mail server from any computer and see your email in the relevant folders. Most email programs allow you to work “offline” from a local copy of your mailbox so you can still read/reply to email when you are not connected to the internet.

IMAP is ideal if:

you read/reply to your email on several computers (including via webmail).
you use a mobile email device such as a BlackBerry or our webmail service.
you don’t receive a huge volume of email, or many large attachments.
several people share a mailbox (for example a generic “sales@” email address).

As your email is stored on the server, it counts towards the space allowance on your account - if your account becomes full you will need to delete some email, download it to your computer or upgrade your account to give yourself more storage space.

Generally, we advise people to use POP unless there is an overriding need to use IMAP.

One more option… SMTP

Beyond the scope of this article, with mentioning SMTP. If your company has it’s own mail server on it’s network (such as, Microsoft Exchange), we can arrange for email for your domain(s) to be delivered and provide a backup server incase your network or server is unavailable. Please note email delivered by SMTP does not get filtered for viruses/spam on our servers - so you will need to make alternative arrangements.

Information in these guides and articles is provided free of charge and without warranty.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our brand new hosting service.

We have moved to brand new super-quick servers, and added an array of new features including a comprehensive control panel and webmail. We have also improved our virus and spam filtering (still standard with all our hosting packages) and increased disk space and transfer allowances in all of our packages.

There are plenty of other exiting new changes planned, so we have setup this blog to keep you up to date.