The purpose of this article is to discuss the major steps needed to be taken in order to keep your webmail in good working order. It is not intended to give a step-by-step setup of the webmail application. Each application has a lot of tools to help you manage and control your email and the proper setup and use of those tools go far beyond the scope of our purpose.
What we intend to do here is get acquainted with keeping your webmail cleaned up and throwing away all the junk and spam. We have found that most of our hosting clients use an email client (i.e. Outlook) to manage their email from their personal computer. That’s a good idea. Once the email client is setup, it is fast and easy to use. Because of that, the client forgets and neglects the webmail. Once that is neglected, the webmail account fills up with old, unwanted mail and the account stops receiving mail. It also robs you of your hosting resources and could slow down your website.
So, this article is to show how to manage that part of your webmail application and avoid unnecessary delays in your service.
The Webmail Portal
When you logon to your Webmail for the first time, you are presented with a portal page that has two bits of information that calls for your action:
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A Got it note
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Three robust webmail applications
The Got it note
You will see a Got it button on the top right of your screen. Click it anytime you want and it should disappear from then on. All it’s saying is that you can choose one of the webmail applications as the default.
Webmail Applications
Three webmail applications are also presented on the portal page:
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Horde
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Roundcube
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SquirrelMail
You can try out all three of the webmail applications if you have a mind to. And when you are ready, choose one as the default application. We prefer horde, so that is the one we follow to manage our webmail account. When you click the horde application button, the application opens (if you set the default, it will avoid the choices and take you straight to the email control panel next time you logon).
The Webmail Control Panel
The control panel will display the webmail’s navigation bar at the top most part of the page. That menu controls the webmail application. Immediately under that menu is displayed a menu bar to help control the email (we will call that The Email Menu).
The left column also has a menu that we will refer to as The Box Menu as it helps control the individual email box.
The Individual Webmail Panel
If you logged on to an individual email account, you will find your received email in the Inbox and displayed as a list in the display panel to the right.
If you logged on by using the Default Email Account, it opens your hosting account’s webmail and you should see all your email accounts associated with that domain listed in the Box Menu (the left panel).
If you don’t see any email accounts listed, click the Folder Actions dropdown menu on the Box Menu. Then click Show All Mailboxes. Now you can manage all of your accounts associated with your domain one at a time.
When you click on an email account that you want to work with, all the emails are displayed in the display panel on the right and three menu choices are added to the Email Menu: Reply, Forward, and Delete.
The display panel is divided into two sections. The top section lists the individual emails and the bottom section serves as a reading pane. You can click, hold, and drag the dividing section between the two panes to increase/decrease either pane. Click any email on the list to read it in the reading pane, or double click an email on the list to open it in your browser window
Delete an email (or group of emails) by selecting it (them) and the clicking the Delete menu on the Email Menu. When you delete an email, it does not remove it from your account, but simply moves it to your Trash folder. That’s one reason why a box fills up when working with a mail client. You think you have deleted it from your webmail, but it only moves it to another folder.
To remove the email from your hosting account, after you have deleted it, click Other on the Email Menu. From the dropdown menu, select Purge Deleted. That will remove the email from the system.
