If you have an office-wide interruption of email and/or website services, please check our network status number, 617.778.1225. This number has a recorded message with our current network status. Always check this number and make sure that your Internet connection is operating properly before calling our main office at 617.267.9716 (0207 7700 9977 in UK).

Please note that we plan our regular maintenance on our servers between 12AM and 5AM Eastern Time on the first Sunday of every month.

Each email program is slightly different, but most email clients use these settings. Your account will differ based on your actual email address and domain. For this example, we'll use the email address "john@company.com":

Incoming/POP server: mail.company.com

Outgoing/SMTP server: mail.company.com

Username: john@company.com

Password: (account password)

Note, in some programs, the Username is called "Account Name" or "Login"

Outlook 2007 Users, please make sure to read this note about your settings.

If you still have email that functions (i.e. you've forgotten the password but your email program has it saved), email us at email@techsuperpowers.com to request your password to be sent to your email address. Otherwise, call us at 617.267.9716 (0207 7700 9977 in UK) to contact our support group to get the password.

In order to give you the password over the phone, we may require authorization of the email administrator in your office, so we may have to call you back once we have verified your identity.

Our server is set up to require authentication before sending email. Normally, it can authenticate you when you check your mail, so it allows you to send mail without any additional settings. However, sometimes when you send email without having checked your mail in a while, it will give you this message. Follow these instructions on how to set your mail program to authenticate:

Mac OS X Mail 10.4 (Tiger)

Mac OS X Mail 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Outlook Express or Entourage for Mac.

Also note that in some cases, your Internet Service Provider may filter outgoing emails being sent through the standard SMTP port (25). In those cases, change the SMTP outgoing port to 587.

Any requested changes to your email accounts should be sent to email@techsuperpowers.com.

Tech Superpowers email hosting provides webmail services for your email accounts, allowing you to check for new email via any web browser from anywhere in the world.

• Go to: http://pop.techsuperpowers.com
• Type in your entire email address and password and Log In.
• If you'd like to scan your mailbox for a certain sender or subject line, look for the box next to the magnifying glass on the top.
• Type what you're looking for into the "filter" box and press on the magnifying glass. It will then show only the messages that have content, subjects, or sender addresses that match your filter text. To see all emails again, remove the text from the "filter" box and press on the button again.

Follow the directions above for checking your email via the web.

Click on "Setup Auto Reply" on the left side.

Type in the message under "Vacation Message" and then click the "Enable" button.

Please note that the Auto Reply message is sent just once to each address, in order to avoid sending multiple copies to mailing lists.

To turn off, remove the check box by "Enabled" and then click on Green Check Mark along the top toolbar.

Press the logout button in the upper left hand portion of the screen. It is very important that you log off when using your email account on a public computer, like at an Internet Cafe. If you do not do so, someone else may be able to read your email after you leave.

Every email that goes through our system from another mail server is rated on it's "spamminess" based on dozens of criteria. When it matches any of these criteria, it gets points for each one. Once the number of points go above a set threshold - your "Spam Threshold" - our spam filter automatically moves the spam into your Junkmail folder on the server.

This threshold is set to 5.1 by default. By lowering this number, you can increase the number of spams caught by your individual filter. However, this also increases the chance that a legitimate email may be caught by the filter.

For most people the default is sufficient, but if you'd like your spam filter to be more aggressive, you can lower this score. We recommend lowering the score by no more than 0.3 at a time.

If the threshold is lowered more than 4.0, there is a very high likelihood that legitimate emails will be caught by the filter.

To change your Spam Threshold, please click on this link: http://www.techsuperpowers.com/filter

Enter your email address and password on the right side under "User Login" and you'll be directed to a form. Then modify the Spam Threshold and hit "Submit Changes" at the bottom of the page.

Log in to webmail, then click on the "Junkmail" mailbox along the left. Listed in the Junkmail mailbox will be all emals that have been filtered by our Spam Filtering Service. NOTE: if your Junkmail box has more than a 1000 messages, this may take a little while to load.

You can click on any of their subjects to read the emails, or you can select them individually and click the Trash Can icon to delete.The Trash Can icon looks like: If you would like to receive incorrectly filtered messages, select the messages you'd like to move, then select "Inbox" in the pull down menu at the bottom of the screen and click on the "Move to..." button.The Move To icon looks like: This will move the messages to your Inbox, and they will be received the next time you check your mail.

Click on the check box right next to "Status" on the top of the list of messages. You will see all the messages on that screen marked with a checkmark. Then press the Trash Can icon, which will delete all marked messages.

Once in webmail, click on the check mark next to each junk message. Then pull down the "-Select Folder-" menu and select "Report Spam." Then click on the "Move to..." button. The Move To icon looks like: This will move the messages to your "Report Spam" folder where they will be used to train your Junkmail filter.

Click on this link: http://www.techsuperpowers.com/filter

Enter your email address and password on the right side under "User Login" and you'll be directed to a form. Follow the directions on the form and we'll add the user to your "Approved List" or "Blocked List" list instantaneously.

Click on this link: http://www.techsuperpowers.com/filter

Enter your email address and password on the right side under "User Login" and you'll be directed to a form. Check the box next to "I would like to receive nightly Junk Mail Summary emails" and then hit the "Submit Changes" button at the bottom. You will then receive an email at 4AM ET (9AM BT) with a complete list of your emails which have been caught in your spam filter in the last 24 hours.

Your email program's junkmail filter and our server-based filter are two completely different systems. If emails are getting caught by our server's junk mail filter, you will need to tell our server to always allow that address by following the directions immediately above on "How do I make sure that an address is always approved or blocked by my spam filter?" Making changes to your email program's settings will not change how our server handles junk mail.

Similarly, if you have an email which is getting caught on your email program's junk mail filter, adding it to our list of "never filter" addresses will not change how your email program handles the email.

This is a result of Email "spoofing" - see this page for more information on what this is and how it happens.

In your email program, select the option to view "Full Headers" in the menus. Then forward the message to us at email@techsuperpowers.com. Click here for instructions specific to your mail program.

Tech Superpowers offers domain-wide antivirus filtering for our customers. This free feature allows your entire domain's email to be scanned for files containing known viruses. If an attached file matches a virus signature, the the email is bounced back to the sender immediately and the email is deleted. While many of our customers are Mac customers (who are not affected by almost all of the viruses "in the wild"), this scanning capability does reduce some types of spam and also eliminates the possibility of a Mac passing on a virus to other PCs.

This feature is being made available to all Tech Superpowers hosting customers on a per-domain basis, meaning that you have the option to enable it for all traffic coming into your hosting domain.

In deciding whether or not to activate this for your domain, you should consider that it may be possible for a client to inadvertently send you an email with a virus and for that email to be rejected by our server. The client will be notified, but you will be unaware that they have sent an email with a virus. For many of our customers, this is acceptable, given the increased protection. However, some of our customers may want to avoid this risk altogether, so we require your explicit request for activation.

If you would like to activate this feature on your domain, please just email us at hosting@techsuperpowers.com with the name of your domain(s) as a confirmation that you would like to turn on anti-virus support.

In short: you will not know.

Our scanner will bounce back the incoming email immediately and delete the virus without notifying the original recipient or quarantining the email. Why?

1) Because unlike spam, which is in itself an inconvenience, a virus is an inherently damaging payload and should be deleted as soon as it's identified.

2) In our testing over tens of thousands of messages, there have been no "false positives" - in other words, we didn't see files which were caught by our filter as a virus but didn't actually contain one.

3) The vast majority of incoming viruses are from spam sources and notifications to our users would create even more unwanted emails.

Our servers are OS X and UNIX-based, which means they have MySQL and PHP as available technologies, but not any Microsoft-specific technologies like Access or ASP. We do have WebDAV capabilities through our Apple Xserve servers.

PHP and MySQL access for a small number of databases are included in your TSP hosting account. WebDAV requires a set up fee and potentially additional monthly fees depending on how it is to be used.

You can use our Configure My iOS Device page to automatically configure your iOS device for our servers. Please note that your TSP Hosting email address and password are required to access this page.

For instructions on how to add the account manually to your iOS device, click here.

For instructions on how to add your account to ICal on your Mac, click here.

Our servers operate with a number of redundant systems, including RAID mirroring and regular backups. In addition, our data center has highly redundant power, data, and environmental systems that minimize the chance of downtime.

However, in the unlikely case of data loss, we cannot guarantee that your files are backed up as of a specific moment. Due to the constant data changes that result with hosting services, it's simply impossible to provide up-to-the-second backups of all information on all servers. Configuration information is backed up regularly.

For this reason, we recommend that all of our hosting customers do not use our servers as the sole place where their information exists. We recommend that hosting users keep their email synced to local computers and also make sure that websites and all associated materials are backed up as well.

We have backups of email for the purposes of recovery from a major hardware failure. However, due to the nature of the large amount of data which our email servers handle, we do not archive this information, so email is not available for recovery beyond a 24-hour period.

If you are looking for email archival and retention services, we can provide this service in the form of regular offsite snapshots of your email accounts, as part of our Offsite Backup service. However, even this service isn't foolproof, as email can be received and deleted by a user within minutes, so it may not ever show on a nightly backup. If you need fool-proof or regulatory-compliant email archival services, we can help set up a complete solution like Google's Postini. Contact us for more information on either of these services.

Our server has no limits to the size of the mailbox or how long you can keep messages on the server, but we recommend that POP users remove message older than 30 days from the server. Performance of your mailbox may slow down once you have more than a few thousand messages in a single mailbox, and 30 days worth of email is usually a reasonable amount of storage without any impact on performance.

We recommend that IMAP users limit the number of emails in a single mailbox to under 1000 for best performance.

Also, we cannot guarantee that all of your email is backed up at any given moment, so we do not recommend using our server as the only place where you store all of your email.