Specialist internet services · since 2001
Grouped by what's actually gone wrong. If your question isn't here, ring us on 01296 329 200 — and tell us what you were looking for, so it can be here next time.
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They depend on which of our three mail platforms your mailbox is on, so they live on their own page: Email settings. That page tells you how to work out your platform first, then gives you the server name, ports and encryption.
The short version, true on every platform: IMAP port 993, POP3 port 995, SMTP port 465, all with SSL/TLS, and your full email address as the username.
We run three, for different sets of customers:
Whichever one accepts your password is yours. It's worth bookmarking — it also tells you which mail server settings to use, and it's the quickest way to check whether a problem is your account or your mail program.
IMAP, in almost every case. IMAP keeps your mail on our servers and mirrors it to every device, so what you see on your phone matches your laptop, and filing something into a folder on one shows up on the other. If you lose a device, your mail is still on the server.
POP3 downloads mail to one computer and, in most default set-ups, removes it from the server afterwards. That makes it a poor fit for anyone who reads mail in more than one place — which, these days, is nearly everyone. It still has its uses if you deliberately want a single local archive and you have your own backups.
Mostly personal preference — all of them speak IMAP and SMTP, so all of them work with us.
Outlook if you want mail, calendar and tasks together, and it's what the rest of the office uses. Apple Mail if you're on a Mac or iPhone and want something that's already there and stays out of the way. Thunderbird if you want a free, cross-platform client that handles several accounts well.
On phones and tablets, the mail app that came with the device is usually the right answer. Add the account manually as IMAP rather than letting it guess — automatic set-up often picks the wrong server.
This is the single most common problem we're called about, and it's nearly always one of two things.
SMTP authentication is switched off. Find the outgoing server settings and tick the box saying the server requires authentication, then set it to use the same username and password as incoming mail. Incoming will happily work without this; outgoing will not.
Your network is blocking the port. Some office firewalls, hotel Wi-Fi and public networks block outgoing mail ports. Switch your phone to mobile data, or tether your laptop, and try again — if it sends, the network was the problem, not your settings.
Go to your webmail address first and sign in there. That splits the problem in two.
If webmail lets you in, your password is fine and the problem is in your mail program — usually a saved old password, or the username entered as just the bit before the @ rather than the full address.
If webmail also refuses you, the password itself is wrong or has been changed. Give us a ring and we'll sort it.
Add it as an IMAP account, using the settings from the email settings page. The important part: choose the manual or "other" option rather than letting the phone detect things automatically. Automatic set-up guesses server names from your email domain and usually guesses wrong, then fails in a way that's hard to unpick.
You'll be asked for incoming and outgoing servers separately. Both need your full email address as the username, and both need encryption left on.
There are four settings — Low, Medium, High and Extreme.
We recommend Medium for most people. High is noticeably more aggressive but still produces very few false positives, so it's worth trying if Medium is letting too much through. Move up one step at a time rather than jumping to Extreme, and give each level a few days before judging it.
View the message's headers. Our anti-spam servers write their diagnosis into them, including a score that maps directly onto the filtering levels. If a message scored below your current threshold, it was let through by design — and the score tells you which level would have caught it.
If you're seeing several that scored well above your threshold and still arrived, send us the full headers rather than a screenshot and we'll look at why.
Check the score in the headers first. A message that only just crossed your threshold usually means your filtering level is a notch too aggressive for the kind of mail you get — dropping from High to Medium often fixes it.
A legitimate message scoring far above the threshold usually means something is wrong at the sender's end, often their domain's SPF or DKIM records. Send us the headers and we can tell you which, so you can pass it back to them.
Fourteen days, then it's deleted to keep disk usage down. So if you think something legitimate has been filtered, it's worth checking within the fortnight — after that it's gone.
Each account has a quota in MB, and that allowance is shared across all the mailboxes in the account rather than allocated per mailbox. One person keeping every attachment since 2009 will eat into everyone else's room.
If an account goes over its quota, we email the mailbox to let you know. Spam is only kept for 14 days, which helps. If you need more space, contact us and we'll raise it.
In the control panel, under your mailbox settings, you can set an autoresponder. Anyone emailing you gets an automatic reply — useful when you're away for a week and don't want people assuming they've been ignored.
Worth remembering to turn it off when you're back. It's the most common thing people forget.
In the control panel, under mailbox settings, you can set an automatic disclaimer that's appended to outbound mail. It's applied on our side, so it works no matter which device or mail program the message was sent from — including phones.
From the control panel, using the login for your account rather than an individual mailbox. Remember that mailboxes share the account's quota, so adding several will divide the same space further.
Before deleting a mailbox, make sure anything worth keeping has been copied elsewhere — and consider whether an autoresponder pointing at a colleague would serve you better for a while.
In the control panel, under the mailbox's settings. You can usually choose whether to keep a copy on our side as well as forwarding — and it's worth keeping one, so there's still a record here if something goes wrong at the other end.
One warning: forwarding to a large free provider sometimes backfires. Because the message arrives at them from us rather than the original sender, their filters can judge it more harshly, and legitimate mail ends up in a spam folder you don't check. If that starts happening, collecting the mail directly is more reliable than forwarding it.
In the control panel, under the mailbox's settings. You don't need to contact us, and you don't need to wait for office hours — the change takes effect straight away.
Change it from a device you can then update immediately, and read the next answer before you do: every other device still holding the old password will start failing as soon as the new one is live.
Everywhere that mailbox is signed in, which is usually more places than people expect: the desktop mail program, the phone, the tablet, and often a second computer at home. Each one stores the old password and will keep trying it.
This matters more than it sounds. Some mail servers temporarily block an address after repeated failed logins, so one forgotten phone in a drawer can lock out the laptop you're actually using.
The headers will tell you where the delay happened. Every server a message passes through stamps it with a time, so reading the Received lines from the bottom upwards shows you the journey and where it sat.
Often the delay turns out to be at the sending end, before the message ever reached us. If the timestamps point at our servers, send us the full headers and we'll investigate.
Ask them to forward you the whole bounce message, not a screenshot or a description of it. Bounce messages contain a specific reason and usually an error code, and that text tells us in seconds whether the problem is a full mailbox, a mistyped address, a filtering rule or something at their provider.
Send that to us and we can normally say what happened without any guesswork.
a.mx.fluent.ltd.uk and b.mx.fluent.ltd.uk.
You'd normally only need these if you're moving a domain to us, or someone is diagnosing a delivery problem from the outside.
Yes — both, fully managed, alongside our own POP, IMAP and SMTP mailboxes. Which one suits you depends on whether you need the wider Office or Google toolset, or just reliable mail.
It's a short conversation rather than a form. Ring us and we'll tell you honestly which of the three we'd put you on. More on the email page.
If you had to search for something and didn't find it, that's worth knowing — tell us what you were after and we'll add it here.