Setting up Your Email Client If your ISP is AOL
If you have our hosting package or a Total Control website and your ISP is NOT AOL then follow the instructions on Setting up your email within Outlook Express to receive email from your domain.
Outgoing mail
Customers who use AOL as their ISP may face problems that customers of other ISPs don't. The instructions on Setting up your email pertain to setting up Outlook Express to receive email from the mailbox on your domain and give instructions on setting the outgoing SMTP server.
However, as far as we can tell this won't work for AOL users since no matter which outgoing SMTP mail server you have set up Outlook Express to use, AOL software intercepts it at port 25 on your machine and forces it to use the AOL outgoing mail server. The AOL server won't send any mail that isn't from an AOL address so it fails.
AOL are the only ISP to use this email solution and this is a cause of complaint among many AOL users.
This means that you can't send mail that comes from your domain's email account (unless you use your domain's webmail) and must send it from your AOL email account. If you want the email to appear to come from your domain's account instead of your AOL account then you should do the following.
- Open Outlook Express and click on the Tools menu then select Accounts.
- When the Internet Accounts box opens click on the Mail tab.
- Look for your AOL email account in the list and click on it to highlight it.
- Click the Properties button and when the Properties box opens click on the General tab.
- The field marked Name: should show your AOL email address. Change this to your preferred email address.
- Click the OK button then close the Internet Accounts box.
Incoming mail
Incoming mail can be a problem too. If you wish to receive email from a mailbox on your domain then you have 3 choices.
- Set email forwarding from your domain's mailbox to your AOL email address.
- Don't set up a mail account in Outlook Express and only use your webmail account (this has the disadvantage of not storing old emails on your own machine).
- Go ahead and set up a mail account in Outlook Express and accept that you can't set it as your default account for sending out emails. It should still receive emails from your account but will bring up an error message each time you send an email (annoying but not fatal).
