How to ask for email help.
Stuff we need to know
We need to know quite a bit of information from you when you ask for help with the set up of your email.
- What platform are you using? eg Windows, Android phone, iOS on apple phone, ipad.
- What email software are you using? eg Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.
- What versions of everything are you using? Windows 7 is very different to Windows 10. Outlook Express, Outlook 2000, etc are very different to each other, so just saying “Outlook” doesn’t tell us anything.
- What settings are you using? We support lots of different ways to access email. eg imap, pop, webmail are just three.
- What have you done already to try and fix your problem? We don’t really care if you struck a problem and contacted us without doing anything more, but we do care not to waste time trying to fix something if you’ve already tried a number of things and just didn’t think to mention it…. we also don’t want to drive you nuts making suggestions about stuff you’ve already tried.
- What sort of ability do you have? Give us some clue where to start from. We don’t mind if this is the first time you’ve ever touched a computer, but we hate insulting you if you’re a regular pro and we just made you feel annoyed because we treated you like a beginner. 🙂
Common Problems
- Certificate error – some versions of windows have a dummy spit about site certificates. When you get this message you should try and fine the option to ‘view certificate’ and provide us with a screen print of that information. Just telling us that your computer is complaining about the certificate doesn’t tell us why. We need to see the certificate information that your computer is seeing so we can figure out what’s wrong.
How can I get to my mail?
How you access your email depends on where you want to access it from and how many places you want to get to it from and if you want to leave it with us.
- Webmail – You can just use a web browser. Go to dtc.yournet.co.nz/webmail and you’ll be presented with our roundcube interface. The benefit is that you can get to it where ever you have access to a web broswer. The down side is that you have to put in your whole email address and password each time and your mail lives on our server. We do the backups.
- IMAP – You can set up lots of clients to read your mail and the messages will always be the same on every client. eg You can get your email on your phone, laptop, desktop at the same time. The benefit is that everything is in sync and you don’t have to enter passwords every time. The down sides are that you have to install the software on your devices and set it up to work. Perhaps you can do this or perhaps you’ll have to pay someone to help you set it up. The mail also lives on our servers. We do the backups.
- POP – You can set up lots of clients just like IMAP (by choosing the ‘leave mail on server’ option when setting up). The down side is that if you don’t have everyone of your clients configured correctly then things get out of sync. Normally with POP, you also remove the messages from our server. The benefit is that you use less space on our servers. You need to do the backups, we can’t back it up once it leaves our servers. The benefit of POP is that you have the mail on your system and you can control backing up more easily. It can be more complex to set up correctly. Because we don’t hold your mail, other people can’t get it from us.