| Plesk is a control
panel which is used by many web hosts to provide
their customers with Windows and Linux based hosting
solutions so that they can easily serve their
websites to their audiences, but at the same time
provide their employees and colleagues with email
solutions so that they are able to communicate with
each other effectively and conveniently without the
need for memos or any other type of paper based
communications. Email is being increasingly used by
people in today’s internet connected society to
allow them to communicate almost instantly, and
share other things such as computer files without
the need for having to be face to face, which
without emails people would have to be since there
is no other electronic way to transfer computer
files almost instantly; this means that you can
communicate with someone on the other side of the
world to you almost instantly without the need for
having to be close to them, although something of
this scenario is achievable with phone
conversations.
Many companies are increasingly
using electronic based communications such as emails
to allow them to communicate with customers in many
different areas; for example many companies are now
providing customer support with the use of emails,
and you are now also able to receive invoices for
any purchases you have made whether they have been
face to face or over the internet to your email
address which means that you only have to print the
invoice off if you need to, which means that the
company from which you have received the invoice is
saving in paper because in most cases people would
throw the invoice away.
If you do not currently use emails within your
company, then you should try and deploy some sort of
email solution for your employees as appropriate,
since you could improve your sales and customer
satisfaction if you are able to provide your
customers with email based support and sales advise,
since it is one thing which many companies fail to
provide; you might also be able to improve your
employee production if they are able to communicate
with each other more conveniently in a much quick
fashion.
Unlike other forms of communication, you are
normally able to store emails for as long as you
want meaning that you are able to refer back to them
in the future if needs be; you can also access them
whilst mobile if needed since most new mobile
devices such as mobile phones and PDAs have some
sort of built in email application that allows you
to download your emails from your email server as
well as allowing you the ability to create and send
emails whilst on the move, just so long as you have
the appropriate mobile signal.
One downside with emails when compared to other
forms of communication is that you can be easily
targeted by spammers, which means that you will
receive many unwanted and useless emails in your
email inbox which you might not necessarily have
asked for - although these emails might not do any
harm, they can be very annoying and their contents
can prove very disgusting and in some cases
worrying; for example some spam emails request that
you provide certain details to someone since there
is a cash reward awaiting you - if you provide
details then they will most likely be used for
identity fraud and the cash reward that you have
been promised probably doesn’t even exist - at the
end of the day, the same message has probably been
sent to thousands or even millions of unsuspecting
people.
Spam however can be easily stopped with the use
of anti spam programs, such as those that are
normally installed on Plesk based web hosting
servers; for example SpamAssassin is one of the best
known free server side spam solutions and is used by
many web hosts to help stop spam on most Windows and
Linux based web hosting servers. You can also
consider downloading a third party spam application
that should scan any emails which you download into
your desktop email browser; in some cases these can
prove to be more effective than server side ones
since most are more specific with the rule sets that
they use to catch spam emails.
Adding an Email Account
Creating an email account in the Plesk control
panel is a fairly simple process, although there are
certain options that you should try and custom
configure when setting up the email account in
question. As previously mentioned, most web hosts
utilizing Plesk allow you to use the SpamAssassin
installation on the server on which your website
resides to scan your incoming and outgoing email to
ensure that none of it is spam; in some cases you
are also able to use the server’s anti-virus to scan
your incoming emails to ensure that you aren’t
receiving any emails that contain malicious threats
which you damage your computer and even steal any
data that it happens to hold. To start off with, you
will need to navigate to the mail control panel for
the domain that you want to alter by selecting the
mail icon on the domain’s hosting control panel:
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