Setting Up E-mail Accounts

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When you sign up with an ISP, you are given an e-mail address by your ISP that will be something like me@myisp.co.uk. This is all well and good, but there are two main problems with this:

1. If you change to another ISP, you will need to get a new e-mail address.
2. Your ISP's mail servers will only accept e-mail sent when you're connected to your ISP's network. If you're connected to another ISP's network (for example in a wi-fi hotspot or through your mobile phone), your ISP's mail servers will block you from sending e-mail.

Fortunately, both of these problems are easy to overcome if you register your own domain (let's call it www.mydomain.co.uk). This will cost about £5 a year.

Changing to a New ISP

The first thing you need to do is to set-up an e-mail forwarder so that e-mail that's sent to me@mydomain.co.uk is forwarded to me@myisp.co.uk. When you change to another ISP, you just need to change the e-mail forwarder so that it forwards to me@mynewisp.co.uk instead. All your contacts simply carry on using me@mydomain.co.uk and have no idea what ISP you're connected to.

The next step is to set-up your e-mail client to show your me@mydomain.co.uk e-mail address, instead of me@myisp.co.uk or me@mynewisp.co.uk. The screenshots shown here are from Outlook Express 6.0, but the same process is true with all e-mail clients.

You're going to use your ISP's POP3 and SMTP e-mail servers to send and receive e-mail, so enter the information provided by your ISP:

Because you're using your ISP's mail servers, you also need to use the account name and password provided by your ISP:

There are more settings that you need to enter, but, in Outlook Express, you need to create the account, and then modify it. You need to enter me@mydomain.co.uk for the E-mail address and Reply address. When you first go into the properties, the screen will look like:

You need to change it, so that it looks like:

Once you've done this, you can go to the servers tab to check the information that you entered when creating your account:

This is all you need to do, but, as I mentioned before, your ISP will block access to its SMTP server if you're not connected to its network. I'll explain how to get around this in the next section.

Sending E-mail While Roaming

Because your ISP will block access to its SMTP servers when you're not connected to its network, you need to change some more settings if you're going to send e-mail while you're away from home.

You have four options:

1. Your ISP might allow access to its SMTP servers if you authenticate yourself.
2. Your domain host might allow access to its SMTP servers if you authenticate yourself.
3. You can sign up for a Gmail (Googlemail in the UK) account. Google allows access to its SMTP servers if you authenticate yourself.
4. Use the SMTP servers of whatever network you're connected to.

The 4th option is only practical if you're only ever connected to one network when away from home. The process is exactly the same for all 4 options (although you might not need authentication if you use option 4).

The first step is to click on the tick-box next to "My server requires authentication":

Then click on the Settings button next to it, and select "Log on using":

You then need to enter the username and password of your chosen SMTP server:

After clicking on OK, the final step is to change the SMTP server from mail.myisp.co.uk to your chosen SMTP server:

Sometimes, setting an e-mail address that doesn't match the account name causes e-mail to be treated as Spam. If this happens to you, the only solution is to change the e-mail address back to that of your ISP:

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