-
What does the 'Pop Links' screen allow me to do?
The Pop Links screen allows you to configure external POP3 mail
servers or Hotmail accounts! You can then retrieve email from these external servers
to your OKmail account.
Top
-
How do I add a new external POP server/Hotmail account?
Go to the Pop Links screen and click the 'Add New Item' button. This will present a list of mostly blank fields
that you have to fill in.
- Display name : A name of your choice. Used in the popup menu on the Mailbox screen and
in any feedback or error messages
- Type : The type of server, this can be a POP
server, a POP server that uses APOP authentication, or a Hotmail account.
For MSN accounts select the 'Hotmail' type
- Server : The Internet hostname of the POP server
(eg mail.yourisp.com). Ignore this for Hotmail accounts. For MSN
(non-Hotmail) accounts use the server name
http://oe.msn.msnmail.hotmail.com/cgi-bin/hmdata .
- Port : The port the POP server lives on. Almost
always 110. You can use port 995, if your POP server works over SSL.
Ignore this setting for Hotmail accounts. For MSN (non-Hotmail)
accounts use port 80.
- User name/Password : Your server/ISP user name and
your server/ISP password. For Hotmail
just type your user name without the '@Hotmail.com'. For MSN
(non-Hotmail) accounts type your user name including the domain
(i.e. '@msn.com').
- Leave on server : When messages are retrieved from
a server, you can either have the messages deleted from the server
immediately or left on the server for 1 week, 1 month or 6 months. See below for
more details. Please select 'Delete immediately' or '1 week' if possible to ensure your mail checking completes as fast as possible.
- Scheduled check : You can configure OKmail to
automatically check a link every 3 or 12 hours to retrieve messages back
to your OKmail account.
- Disabled : If 5 POP/Hotmail connection errors occur
in a row, the link will be automatically disabled and you'll be sent an
email to that effect. This usually means that the link was incorrectly
configured (eg wrong user name, password, etc) If this occurs, you should
come back to the Pop Links screen, confirm the entered details, and then
make sure this box is cleared to re-enable the link.
Once you have filled in all the details, click the 'Save' button to add in the new server.
After this, you can test that all the details are correct by clicking the 'Test' button. This
will attempt to connect to the remote POP server and see that it can login, but it will not
retrieve any messages.
To do a manual retrieval of messages, you can go back to the
Mailbox screen and select the POP server from the drop down box at
the top left of the screen and click 'Do' button. See
What does the 'Retrieve:' button do?
for more details.
Top
-
What does setting a schedule do?
When you set the 'Scheduled check' option for a link, OKmail will connect to that link every 3 or 12 hours
automatically and retrieve any messages according to the other options specified for the link. It will do this
even when you're not logged in.
This can be useful if you use OKmail as a central email store. This way all email you get from
any account will be retrieved to OKmail which you can then read through IMAP or the web interface.
Top
-
How does OKmail delete a message after 1 week/1 month/6 months?
OKmail keeps track of messages already retrieved from a server and when it retrieved them. Each time
you check a link, it checks each message on the server and determines how long it was since it retrieved
the message. If it's greater than 1 week/1 month/6 months, it deletes the message.
Top
-
I want to leave messages on a server permanently; can I do that?
Yes. Enhanced users can keep emails on the remote server forever. When
doing this, you are restricted to only retrieving every 24 hours. Otherwise
6 months is the maximum time you can keep email on a remote server.
Top
-
What does "Clear retrieved message ids" do?
When you download email from an external POP or Hotmail account, you
may choose not to immediately delete messages from the external server.
However, when you next get email from that account, you do not of course
want to download those same messages again! Therefore, OKmail keeps a
log of every message ID that you download through every link, and uses that
to avoid downloading the same message twice.
If you click "Clear retrieved msg id", the message ID log is removed for
that link, so that next time you download from that link, every message
will be downloaded again (unless it has been deleted from the server, of
course).
This is useful if you need to download a message again, because for
instance you accidentally deleted it the first time.
Top
-
What happens to errors that occur while retrieving from a Pop Link?
Depending on the error, you'll either get a message immediately on the
next screen when doing a manual retrieve, or you'll be sent an email that
describes the error.
Errors that appear immediately include:
- Link 'xyx' is disabled - go to the Pop Links screen and re-enable
the relevant Pop Link. Pop Links are automatically disabled after 5 errors
in a row. This usually is a sign of a bad server name, incorrect login, etc
- Pop/Hotmail retrieve on link 'xyz' already in progress - you
will get this error if you recently initiated a retrieve that is still in
progress, or if a scheduled retrieve is currently occurring on a link.
Errors that you can receive by email:
- Connection failed, no messages retrieved - this means OKmail encountered some error connecting to the remote server. Check the 'Extra'
field for more details. The most common problems are:
- Timed out connecting to Pop/Hotmail server - OKmail will allow
up to 60 seconds to connect to an external server. If it takes longer than
this, you'll receive this message. This usually means there are network
problems between OKmail and the server you are trying to retrieve from.
Try again later.
- Pop Server does not support the UIDL command - Some rare POP
servers don't support the UIDL command. To retrieve correctly from these
servers, you must set them to Delete Immediately otherwise you
will receive this message
- There were some errors retrieving messages - this means OKmail encountered some error trying to retrieve a particular message from the
remote server. Check the following text for details. The most common
errors are:
- Could not retrieve msg 'xyz' from server - this is a generic
message when there are problems at the POP protocol level. The 'Extra'
field usually provides more technical error details. This usually means
so low level error occurred. It's best to just retry the retrieve.
- Could not deliver msg 'xyz' to mailbox - this is a generic
message when an error occurs trying to deliver a retrieved message
to your mailbox. The 'Extra' field usually provides more details. The
two most common reasons are 'over quota' accounts, and some 'bad
headers', which some Hotmail messages tend to have. If you receive
a 'bad header' message, please forward it to
the support team
- A timeout occurred trying to download a Pop/Hotmail message -
OKmail will allow 30 seconds to download each message (plus 30 seconds
per 500k of message data). This is normally sufficient for most connections,
but some particularly slow ones may have problems. When a timeout occurs,
OKmail will leave the message on the server, but depending on your
settings it may or may not try and retrieve the message again. Read
the error message for more details.
Top
-
I want to retrieve email from Yahoo!Mail, mail.com, email.com, etc. How do I do that?
Yahoo!Mail allows POP access if you signup for their Yahoo!Delivers program,
which basically means you allow them to send you spam.
Most other webmail providers only provide POP access as a paid option,
and we currently don't have ways of 'screen scraping' these accounts.
However, you can get a program you can run on your PC to do this
called web2pop.
NOTE: We don't actually use this program
ourselves, we've just heard that people have had some success with it.
Top
-
How do I put mail retrieved from a POP Link into a folder?
When you create a POP Link, you can specify the folder you
want the POP Linked mails filed to. Just choose the folder from
the drop-down menu next to the field "File into folder".
You can also do this using rules in the 'Define Rules' screen.
Every email retrieved through a POP link has an "X-LinkName"
header added to it. This allows you to effectively sort your mail
according to the Pop Link it was retrieved through. The header looks
like this: "X-LinkName: FooBar" where FooBar is the name of the Pop
Link as specified in the Pop Links screen.
In order to file mails in a folder according to the Pop Link they
were retrieved from, go to the Define Rules screen and create a
new file into folder rule. Use the 'Advanced' type from the pop
up menu and use the following criteria:
header :contains ["X-LinkName"] "ISP Mailbox"
Just copy and paste this into the 'For text matching' area of a
new Advanced Rule. Replace ISP Mailbox with the name of your Pop
Link, and set the 'File into folder' option so that it points to
the folder you want to file this Pop Link's mails to.
Top