Rapidlistings Hosted Email

Setting Up Email Accounts
When you have any of the non-free Rapidlistings packages, you get email accounts to go along with the domain name used for your account. If you have the BasicPlus package you get 2 email accounts. Professional gives you 5 email accounts. Corporate Package allows for an unlimited number of email accounts. To set up email for the first time you must contact our customer service and request email accounts be created. Be prepared to answer the questions of "What do you want your email addresses to be named?" and "What would you like as a starting password for them? For example, if you had a website called www.example.com you would specify that you perhaps want sales@example.com created as an email address, and give a password to go with it. Common real estate email address names to have are usually based on people's real names and words such as info, sales, listings and similar. i.e. info@example.com

Once your email accounts have been created, you need to learn how to check them via the online mailbox (see below).

Your Online Mailbox
Your online mailbox becomes available after your email accounts have been created. It exists at a special web address based on your site. If your website was www.example.com then the address would be at www.example.com/mail which as you can see is just your website address with a /mail tacked onto the end. Once you arrive at this address you'll be prompted by a screen with a that should have a blue background, and a mail program calling itself Mail Enable is waiting. Mail Enable wants to know 2 things: Username and Password. Your username is the FULL email address you have with your Rapidlistings account. If for example you're checking yourname@example.com then the username is yourname@example.com. The #1 mistake people make in logging into the online mail system is just putting "yourname" instead of the full email address. So, to recap - Username = Email Address. The password is of course whatever you specified you wanted it as when you contacted us to have your email address created. Note that both password and username are case sensitive.

Once you're inside your online mailbox you will find it has a simple interface, with controls for spam filtering, email forwarding and a few other odds and ends. You may begin to send and recieve mail immediately. Please note that you can also change the password from inside the online mailbox interface, if you do not wish to retain the same password you started with.

A Quirk Of The Online Mailbox To Be Aware Of: Each mailbox has a certain amount of storage space. If you exceed that limit the box will cease to accept mail. To delete old messages from time to time, use the delete option you will see in the various folders. Be aware however that "deleted" mail really goes to the Deleted Items folder and still exists. To actually get rid of anything permanently you need to view your Deleted Items folder and select the delete option again inside of it. Once things are deleted from the deleted items folder, they are gone forever.

A Few Notes Of Advice With Email Settings: We've all had that problem in the past where an email was sent out and someone got it, but it went to their spam folder. There are a lot of things that can make email be percieved as spam. The quickest way to get yourself marked as spam is usually to setup email forwarding. Email forwarding is useful, but ponder this: If you get X amount of spam emails to your email account each day, and have it set to forward all your email off to another account at perhaps Gmail, then Gmail's perception may be that your email address, as the middle man doing forwarding, is a spammer. This can result in your mail not being welcomed elsewhere. Do keep this in mind if you frequently forward mail. On a related note, setting up email auto-replies can have a similar effect if your account keeps replying to bogus email addresses or valid ones that were left as the reply-to address. Where automation exists, there is always room for caution. These words of wisdow are brought to you by our tech support, who have seen this happen countless times.

POP Based Email
First off, be advised that Rapidlistings can only promise to make the online mailbox work for you. Any time a third party email program or device comes into the mix, you're at the mercy of whatever entity created the program or device. Our tech support can't help you with the quirks of setting up an iPhone or Blackberry, and the assorted email programs on the market such as Microsoft's Outlook or Mozilla's Thunderbird beyond providing you with the basic POP settings.

POP (Post Office Protocol) Settings:

USERNAME: This should be your FULL email address. i.e. youralias@yourdomain.com
EMAIL ADDRESS: This should be your FULL email address. i.e. youralias@yourdomain.com
PASSWORD: This should be your current email password.

INCOMING MAIL SERVER: This is based on your domain name. Instead of www.yourdomainname.com you would enter mail.yourdomainname.com - Note that this is simply broken down into putting "mail." in front of your domain name. So if your domain was www.realestatonplanetvenus.com your incoming mail server would then be mail.realestateonplanetvenus.com

OUTGOING MAIL SERVER: The outgoing mail server is the same as the incoming mail server. Again, our example would yield mail.realestateonplanetvenus.com in this case. Please be advised that some email programs will make you go to an advanced option and specify that yes, yes you really do want to use the same incoming and outgoing settings*.
An alternative for the outgoing mail server can sometimes be to use your local ISP's settings. However, you should try it with the normal mail server first and only use this as a worst case scenario if you can't get it to work.

Misc Ports & Settings: By default, no other special settings are needed to access POP email through Rapidlistings.

Additional Notes:

• If you're still using Microsoft's Outlook Express then you should consider upgrading to a more modern email program. A lot of people still use it, but it has technically been discontinued for years.
• If you have no POP capable email program then try doing a Google search for "Mozilla Thunderbird" which Rapidlistings recommends as an excellent, free, POP capable email program. There are versions for many different operating systems as well.
• *Note that with some versions of Microsoft Outlook, the outgoing mail server, when set to the same as the inbound mail server, may require you to visit the Advanced Options menu, find the outgoing server settings and specially tell it to use the same incoming and outgoing mail server.
• These notes contain just about everything our tech support can tell you about third party email programs and devices, so if you're still having problems please start by checking the user manual/help files for your program or device. Don't forget, you can always use the online mailbox.

External Email with MX Records
If you have owned your domain prior to making a Rapidlistings account, and had email already configured for it which you wish to keep instead of using Rapidlistings based email services, you may do so by providing us with MX records from your domain's current email host. Please contact your current email provider and tell them you need such records, and then pass them on to our support staff. Otherwise your existing email will be interupted.

Email Issues
Email is a fickle thing. The following are the main problems our support staff encounters involving email, noted here for the sake of troubleshooting.

• Too Much Spam! - If you're using an email account hosted by Rapidlistings and getting too much spam, the first thing you can do is log into your online mailbox and find the spam controls to block a lot of junk right away. If you're using a POP email program as well, most of those sort of programs have additional spam filtering settings inside of them and can help out as well.
• Email Isn't Reaching You From One Particular Person/Source - Rapidlistings isn't purposely blocking email from anyone. The exceptions to that rule may be inbound messages with very large file attachments may be rejected automatically by our server. If someone can't seem to get email through to you and they are including a file, have them try sending you something without the file and see if it gets there. Another exception to the rule may be messages sent from yourself, back to yourself at the same email address: This can look suspicious to the mailserver. This is most commonly seen as people trying to CC themselves. Chances are most people have a copy of their email already in their SENT folder so this is an irrelevant thing to do.
• Email Isn't Reaching You From Anyone - If you're using just the online mailbox, make sure you haven't exceeded its capacity. If you're using a third party program like Outlook to check your email, then check that you're connecting successfully via your POP settings and see that your Spam and/or Trash folders are not where your mail is going, and that no external programs (anti-virus software/firewall) on your machine are eating your mail.
• Email To One Particular Person/Source Isn't Arriving - If you can send mail to some addresses but not all, then the email issue is most on the recieving end. It is NOT POSSIBLE for Rapidlistings support staff to know why a mailserver at another company isn't taking your mail on any given day. The usual reasons tend to be that they think you're sending spam or that they have their own issues. If you get some sort of message back from the remote mailserver with an error code or rejection reason you're welcome to forward that on to our support address. If you get nothing back and the person(s) who were supposed to get your email simply never see it show up, then chances are your email has been filtered. Filters come in a few forms. We're all familiar with the typical spam folder in our own email where we can see what was taken out of the email flow. However, you should be aware that a lot of big email providers also filter messages before they ever have a chance to reach your own spam folder, so some things may simply vanish without a trace. When in doubt, ask your email provider about their email filtering policies. Keep in mind that Rapidlistings can't force other email providers to accept your email if they don't want to.
• Email To Anyone At All Isn't Arriving - If this is the case, you should probably contact our support staff so they can weigh in on it.
• Getting Email That Looks Valid, But Not Sure? - When in doubt, don't click on links, don't download or open file attachments. Negative entities are waiting to see who they can take advantage of on the web at all times, so a bit of caution is always a good thing.
• Not Getting Information From Forms On Website - All information harvested from the forms on your website goes to the address used on the Contact Page. Make sure this is a valid email address. Also keep in mind that most forms on your site that collect data are voluntary, so it may simply be that no one is sending you anything, although you can always test your forms by submitting on yourself.