email

iOsphere provides a range of email services that you can use as a stand-alone service or as part of an access or hosting package.

Regardless of the type of email service you use you can send and receive email messages using any standard email client that supports the SMTP and POP3 (or IMAP) email protocols, such as 'Eudora' or 'Outlook', or using your web browser to access our webmail interface. You can also Telnet to our server www.iosphere.net.au and use the pine or binmail utilities to access your email.

Our services include:

• email "client" services
• email "server" services
• mailing lists
• webmail

Please refer our terms and conditions page for additional details about services.

email client services

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iOsphere email client services let you send and receive email using an account or account alias such as my-email-address@iosphere.net.au.

We can also provide email addresses within the carringbush.net(.au) and matrixarts.net(.au). Please ask us for further information about addresses within these domains.

Internet access and 'stand-alone' email account customers may have up to two personal aliases in addition to their base account name.

This service is free to access and domain hosting clients and $30/year to stand-alone email customers.

Our server name for the IMAP, POP3 and SMTP protocols is mail.iosphere.net.au.

email server services

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Our email server services allow you to send and receive email using addresses based on a domain name registered to you such as your-company.com or your-group.org.au.

Having your own email server service gives you great flexibilty in your choice of email addresses and gives you the option of using other services such as mailing lists.

With an email server service a virtual email server configured to your requirements is set up at our offices.

Your virtual email server is configured with your domain name, a set of registered email users, email aliases and static mailing lists according to your needs.

Your server will receive mail sent to the registered users of your domain and forward mail to them as specified in the mail configuration. Mail can be forwarded either to an iOsphere base account or to external acounts.

Email server clients may have up to 5 accounts and aliases. Extra accounts in blocks of 5 may be obtained at $30 /block.

If you have a virtual email server, you can also have a static or dynamic mailing list set up with us to allow email to be sent to specific groups of people.

You can also 2 static mailing lists of up to 10 addresses for no charge if this is done when the service is set up.

A fee of $100 is charged to setup a managed email lists for a domain. Up to 5 lists may be included in the initial setup at this price.

Please note we charge a minimum configuration change fee of $30 applies for changes to this email server configurations.

accounts and aliases

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All iOsphere customers are provided with a base account consisting of a user-name and a password. Your base account user-name can be used for email services, but you can also set up aliases to this user name to allow you to send and receive email using alternative names.

Using an account alias gives you flexibility to vary which email address you use for different work or home pursuits and allows you to drop a particular address if, for example, you start to receive a lot of junk mail for a particular alias.

base accounts

A base account is set up for you when you sign up for an iOsphere account. You may choose any account name as long as the name follows these guidelines:

• the name is between 2 and 8 characters long
• it contains only numbers and letters
• is not already in use
• is not a generic word such as info or sales

aliases

When you set up your account you can also specify account aliases for your base account.

Mail sent to your account alias is automatically directed to your base account, so you don't need to worry about having multiple login names to access your mail.

You can also send mail using any of your aliases using the 'multiple personalities' facility available in most email client packages.

For example, the account email address for:

might have an alias of

and

mail forwarding

You can arrange to have email forwarded from another ISP to your account with iOsphere. Alternatively you can have your iOsphere mail forwarded to a different ISP.

This arrangement can be useful when you have Internet access arrangements through your work or if you use more than one ISP.

external aliases

It is possible that some users of our email server service may not have base iOsphere accounts. You may in these cases have an external alias, which redirects messages received for such an address to an address with another organisation.

For example:

  legal.adviser@my-domain.com

might be redirected to

    > jsmith@some-lawyers.com

External email aliases are particularly useful for organisations which have office bearers which change from time to time. Email can be sent to a 'position' such as secretary@myorganisation.org.au and then forwarded by our server to bsmith@some-other-isp.net.au.

Please note, iOsphere base accounts may not have external aliases, but mail forwarding achieves similar results and is permitted.

mailing lists

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iOsphere provides two types of mailing lists to email server customers. Static mailing lists whose membership is managed by us, and dynamic mailing lists which provide additional features and largely self-managing or managed by you the customer.

Mailing lists allow Internet users to send mail to a single address and have the message forwarded to a number other addresses seamlessly.

An examples of email lists might include:

tasmanian.members@my-company.com.au

which sends messages to 8 other email addresses some of which might be within the 'my-company.com.au' domain and some of which might be in other domains altogether

static mailing lists

A static mailing list is a list of addresses that receive email when sent to the list name. It is usually set up when the domain is configured and can only be modified by our staff.

dynamic mailing lists

Dynamic lists provide a way of sending messages in bulk list of email addresses.

Their advantages include:

• THey are easilly configured by you with anumber of useful options
• They can be used as discussion lists with list members being able to send mail to everyone on the list.
• You can manage additions and removal of members from the list yourself
• At your option lists members may opt in and out of the list themselves

Our preferred managed list product is 'Mailman' but we can provide the 'Majordomo' service if this is your preference.

mailing list names

For technical reasons list names must have two parts, a domain prefix and a suffix chosen by you. For example my-domain.com might have a list named my-domain-staff. Mail can be sent to the address mydomain-staff@mydomain.com.

We recommend that an alias be created for the list name for the sake of comvenience. For example the list mydomain-staff@mydomain.com could have the list alias:
staff@mydomain.com may be used to make this more convenient.

webmail

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We also provide browser access to email via a 'web-mail' service.

For email client service customers the address for this is:
http://www.iosphere.net.au/webmail/.

For email server service clients the address is of the form:
http://your-domain-name/webmail/.

Webmail can be used from anywhere in the world where you can access the Internet with a browser such as 'Internet Explorer' or 'Netscape'. If you wish to use this feature often, it is best to use the IMAP protocol on your own computer rather than POP3. The main difference is that IMAP leaves email on our server and only downloads it when its read, whereas POP3 downloads your emails onto your computer and removes them from our server.

If you'd like to more about iOsphere.net.au then visit our contact page.