Electronic mail (E-mail) may be the most popular use of the Internet today. It allows people to send written messages, files, and pictures to other people, anywhere in the world. All you need is an E-mail account and access to the Internet in order to receive messages. E-mail messages are transferred over the Internet to the recipient's E-mail address, as specified by the originator of the message.
Web-based E-mail is the technology that provides the access of an E-mail account by a web browser. Using it is as easy as browsing to the web site, logging on and sending or receiving E-mail messages. Using the web browser as an E-mail client makes the E-mail account accessible from any computer connected to the Internet.
An E-mail address is a single line in the following format: user@host.domain
The part before the '@' sign is called the User Name. When you sign up, you can choose
your own user name, as long as no one else has previously chosen it. This is due to the
fact that user names are unique. After the '@' sign is the name of the system under which
the user's E-mail account resides, in this case: host.domain.
There are several types of domains. Companies or commercial organizations use
"com", while educational institutions use "edu" or "ac".
Government addresses use "gov" and military addresses use "mil".
Gateways and other administrative hosts for a network use "net", and private
organizations use "org".
Countries also have their own domains. Some examples of Country domains are:
au Australia
br Brazil
ca Canada
de Germany
uk United Kingdom
netscape.com
netcom.com
aol.com
compuserve.com
mit.edu
stanford.edu
navy.mil
whitehouse.gov
ieee.org
Computer viruses do exist and some can cause significant problems. If you are concerned about your computer's integrity or have important files on your computer, we recommend that you do not download files or programs from unknown sources.
When you wish to add a picture or a sound file to your message or share a document with a colleague at work or school, you may do so by attaching the desired file to your message. The recipient of the message will need a software application that recognizes the type of file sent, in order to open the attachment. Most picture and sound file types are recognized by today's popular web browsers, thus no extra software is necessary in order to open files of such types.
Note: Attaching large files will result in longer download time for the recipient and therefore is not recommended.
A signature is a block of text that may be included at the end of your outgoing messages. You can have the signature include your name, E-mail address, company logo or any other text you desire. Try and keep your signature short, no more than a few lines, as this signature may be appended to your outgoing messages, adding overhead to the transfer time of the message. An example of a signature:
------------------------- My First & Last Name mylogin@host.domain http://www.host.domain
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It is not possible to change your user name. Your user name is the unique part of your E-mail address. Any change to your user name will change your E-mail address.
We recommend that you register for a new account with the user name that you would like to use. Once you have set up your new account, please following the instructions here in order to cancel your previous account.
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Our E-mail service allows between 4 - 10 characters in a password. Be sure to use a long enough password, thus insuring the better security of your account.
Your messages, as well as any other information kept in your account, are password protected. Nobody but you will be able to access them, unless they have your account name and password. Your account name and password are your privately owned confidential information. We will not disclose your account name or password to anyone but yourself.
In order to make sure that your account data is kept confidential, please use the following guidelines:
In order to print the contents of a message, first open the message in the message view window and then use the Print option of your browser (usually located in the File menu or on the toolbar).
Your Name & Title is the field that appears just before your E-mail address on your outgoing messages. In order to change or modify your Name & Title, please click on the Preferences button on the task bar. You will be placed in the User Preferences page. At the top of this page you will see the text box for the Name & Title field. Enter the text that you would like to have placed on your outgoing messages besides your E-mail address. Then click the OK button at the bottom of the page.
In order to modify your password, please do the following:
Note: At present, there is no way for you to change your password reminder question or answer. However, if you send your username and password to our Technical Support Department, with the changes you wish to make, we can make the changes for you.
At the present time, you will not be able to have your messages downloaded to an off-line client or have them forwarded to another E-mail address. Since our E-mail is free, we use the advertisements as the only profit source for this service. Without the advertisements there would be no free E-mail service. Our E-mail is Web-based, thus you will only be able to use a Web browser to access your E-mail. E-mail programs such as: Pronto Family Mail, ProntoMail Pro, Microsoft Outlook, Eudora Lite and Netscape Messenger cannot be used for this purpose.
You can save your messages to your computer manually, by either forwarding each message to your other E-mail account as an E-mail, or by saving the E-mail document as a file to your hard disk.
An E-mail that is over 25 KB usually contains an attachment, either a picture or a different file type. To determine if your E-mail contains an attachment, examine the E-mail letter Icon in the Inbox. If the E-mail letter Icon contains a paper clip, then the E-mail contains an attachment. If the E-mail is quite large, for example 100 KB and the E-mail icon does not contain the paper clip then the attachment may have been incorporated into the message text. When you open your E-mail to read, you should find the attachment in the header section of the E-mail, at the bottom of the header area. There must be a Attachment Icon with blue text next to it. The blue text is the file name or description of the attachment. Click on it to open the attachment. If you have an attachment and you cannot find the attachment in the header section, your attachment is most likely corrupted.
There are three main standards that may be used to send attachments: MIME, BinHex 4.0, and UUencode. "MIME" (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is the most common Internet standard and should be the only one you use. All Internet compliant systems understand MIME. The "BinHex 4.0" format is generally used in the Mac and the "UUencode" attachment format is used primarily with UNIX-based Sun computers. Our service uses the "MIME" standard. Currently, our service does not support "BinHex 4.0" and "UUencode" formats. Attachments in these formats will not open properly. We are working on supporting these attachment formats in the near future.
Note: Pictures should be sent in .jpg or .gif because this format is a compressed picture format, whereas .bmp formatted pictures are not compressed. We do not recommend sending .bmp files without compressing them first. A 1.0 MB .bmp file can be compressed to a size of 100-150 KB or about 90% of its former size. Use Winzip (www.winzip.com) or some other compression program for this purpose.
To attach a file, you first start in the compose E-mail page. Then click on attach file. If you do not see this button, make sure your browser supports attachments. Your browser should be Netscape version 2.x or higher and/or MSIE 3.02 (including patch or higher) Only these browser support including attachments. If your browser does not support including attachments you will not see the attachment button. When you click the button, you will be able to browse your hard disk for the file you want to attach.
Actual instructions: "In order to attach files to your message, please follow these steps: Click on the Browse... button to select the file you want to attach, or type the full path name of the file in the box below. Click on the Attach File button. Repeat the above steps in order to attach additional files. When finished, click on the OK button. If you wish to remove an attached file, select its name from the list and click the Remove button".
Note: Make sure that the file is properly named with an extension such as picture.jpg or the recipient may have problems opening the attachment.
In order to attach files to your messages, you must have a browser that supports file
upload (e.g. Netscape Navigator 2.0 or Internet Explorer 3.02 and later).
Note: Internet Explorer 3.02 users must have the File
Upload Patch installed on their system.
There is no limit to the amount of messages stored in your account, however, there is a total disk quota storage limit of 3MB per account. In order to keep you from quickly going over your disk quota storage limit, a limit of 2MB has been placed on the size of each incoming message to your account. If, however, you do exceed your quota limit, you will be requested to remove unnecessary data. Please do so as soon as possible, in order to allow us to provide you with full service. You may wish to start by emptying your Wastebasket folder (if it hasn't already been emptied) by selecting all messages in it and pressing the Delete button.
You can keep any particular message as long as you like. We will not delete messages except for those that you put in your Wastebasket folder. Your messages in the Wastebasket are discarded two days after you have deleted them. However, if you go over your quota limit (3MB), you will need to manually remove some of your stored messages in order to free up space in your account. If you have some particularly large attachments, you may want to save them to your computer and remove them from your account.
When you delete your mail, it is transferred to your Wastebasket folder. If your
Wastebasket has not already been emptied, simply open your Wastebasket folder to read it.
Transfer the message to another personal folder if you don't want it deleted when your Wastebasket
is emptied.
If your Wastebasket has already been emptied, or if you have deleted the messages from your
Wastebasket by pressing the Delete button, there is no way to recover any of the messages
that were in it at the time.
Note: Mail in the Wastebasket takes up storage space in your account. If you
are near or over your storage quota limit (3MB), you may wish to empty your Wastebasket
manually by selecting all messages in it and pressing the Delete button.
Please send an E-mail request to our customer support department at: websupport@commtouch.com,
including the following information:
Full Name (as registered in your account).
E-mail Address.
User name.
Password for the account.
Reason for deleting the account.
It is important to keep the cancellation information in exactly the format as below. Failure to follow the instructions will cause a delay in the cancellation of your account.
Format to follow:
Sessions expire after several minutes of idle time. This is done in order to reduce server load and to protect your privacy in case you forget to logout at the end of a session.
When composing long E-mails, we recommend that you use the Save Draft button often, in order to save your work. This will prevent you from losing any modifications made to your messages and will help in preventing your session from expiring. In order to continue an expired session you need to login again.
Cookies are used for many purposes on the Internet. Basically, they are small pieces of information, which are sent to your browser when you visit a web site and can only be read back later by the site that created them. They are often used to make your web surfing more personal and convenient. Upon logging in to our site, you will receive a cookie that must be stored on your machine. While using our service and switching between screens, the existence of this login cookie is verified. If it does not exist, you may encounter problems using our service.
If cookies are disabled, a page opens describing cookies and how to enable them in order to log in.
If you hit a button or click on a link and nothing happens for an unusually long period, or logging in takes too long, your browser is "hanging". This means that it is waiting for information from a server. At certain times during the day, the network connection between your computer and ours becomes busy and sometimes you have to wait a little longer for a response. Sometimes "reloading" the current page may help, but, if possible, it may be a better idea to try your connection at a later time.
If you are having problems accessing your account, please consider the following:
Cookies are required for you to use our E-mail service. If you are having a problem logging into your account, the easiest, and therefore the first thing to consider, would be to check your browser cookie settings. The classic example of not having the "Cookies" option properly setup, is as follows: "When you attempt to login to your account, you enter your user name and password then click the Login button. The screen goes blank and then reappears with a new login page".
Our E-mail system uses cookies as a token that is sent back and forth from your computer (client) to our E-mail server (server). As long as the "cookie" goes back and forth as needed your E-mail will work. If the cookie is interrupted or not returned, the communication link is terminated. This is why your E-mail session will expire and you will return to the Login Page. Therefore, we recommend that you select "Accept all cookies" WITHOUT prompting for accepting each one.
Please check your browser options concerning 'Cookies'. If you do not accept all the cookies that the E-mail program requires, you will be kicked off of your account. Please select the "Accept all cookies" option in your browser. Below are instructions for both MSIE and Nav/Comm 4.x. To set up cookies, go to your browser options:
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With other browser versions, the setup should be similar.
We use several domains in our service. Make sure you have accessed your account from the correct URL: for example prontomail.com and onlymail.com, are two separate domains, note which domain you are logging onto. If the domain is incorrect you will not be able to log on. You could also distinguish the difference between the domains from the URL used. Check that the URL is correct. The browser may lock up if the text is in caps or mixed upper and lower text. The login page title should match the Domain. SAVE THE CORRECT URL FOR EASY AND FASTER ACCESS.
If you have forgotten your password, click on the Password Reminder link on the Login page and supply your chosen reminder question & answer in order to reveal your correct password.
Please empty/clear/flush your browser's cache. The cache is a place on your hard drive where your browser stores local copies of pages, images and sounds from Web sites you've visited. Emptying the cache is important because it will prevent old, possibly outdated, pages and files from interfering with new downloaded pages.
Netscape Navigator: In Navigator 3, Click to Options/Network Preferences/Cache and click the "Clear Memory Cache Now" and "Clear Disk Cache Now" buttons. Other versions of Navigator have similar commands; please check the help file.
Netscape Communicator: Click Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Cache, then click both "Clear Cache" buttons.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3: In IE3, Click to View/Options/Advanced/ (Temporary Internet Files) Settings/Empty Folder. Early versions of IE have similar commands; please check the help file.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4: Click View/Internet Options, and on the General tab, click on Delete Files in the "Temporary Internet Files" section.
Other Browsers: Almost all browsers have a way to clear the disk cache; please check your documentation or help files.
It is recommended to periodically clear the cookies stored on your hard disk. This needs to be done manually. MSIE cookies are stored in the "Windows/Temporary Internet Files" folder. Find the cookies, then highlight them and delete them. Netscape browsers have a cookie.txt file generally found in the Netscape folder. This file stores all your cookies. You can delete this file, thereby removing all your cookies.
When you login to your E-mail account, your login information is forwarded to our Web servers. If your login process does not complete before the time interval expires, your login is canceled and an error message is generated. In order to balance the server load, many servers are usually linked together. If there is a login error, in most cases, it will appear on only 1 of these servers. The server address you first logged into is stored in your browser's memory. Any attempt to login again will be directed to the server address you first logged into. In order for you to login to a different server, the browser's memory needs to be erased. You MUST totally close down your browser to clear the memory, then login again. This will usually solve your login problem.
Accessing your account requires a username and a matching password. If for some reason you cannot recall one or more of these, please follow the instructions below:
Note: If you cannot remember your username and password, you can always open a new account.
When requesting support from our Technical Support Staff, please be sure to include the following, in order for them to be able to accurately identify the problem and insure a faster response:
In order to make it easier for you to contact our Support Team, we have created a Technical Support Help Request Form