Checking Mail On Multiple Email Accounts

[redwoodhead]

Starting today, when my email client (Eudora) checks the eleven accounts under one of my domains for new mail only three or four are actually checked. A "connection refused by foreign host" message is returned for the others. But when I manually check each of those others, one at a time, there is no problem. Is there any chance that the email server thinks I am a spammer, trying to access too many accounts in a short period of time?

[TCH-James]

Without knowing your domain or account info, I can't say 100%. There are limits to how many times one IP address can login, so you may have hit this barrier. If you open a ticket with the help desk, we can look into this for you.

[redwoodhead]

Thanks for the quick reply. I will open a ticket.

[dcumpian]

Starting today, when my email client (Eudora) checks the eleven accounts under one of my domains for new mail only three or four are actually checked. A "connection refused by foreign host" message is returned for the others. But when I manually check each of those others, one at a time, there is no problem. Is there any chance that the email server thinks I am a spammer, trying to access too many accounts in a short period of time?

 

If Eudora uses multiple connections to check the email accounts, you may need to change this so that each account is checked one at a time, or otherwise limit the number of simultaneous connections.

 

Regards,

Dan

[Samrc]

Don't know if Eudora can do this... I use Outlook and have set 4 different send and receive groups.

That way when I send and receive, I choose one of the groups. Solved my connection problems by limiting to no more than 4 email addys at the same time from a single server. My Outlook reacts better too...no lockups waiting for connections.

[redwoodhead]

Hi Samrc,

Thanks for the suggestion. I looked for that functionality in Eudora but couldn't find anything. That's too bad since it seems like a good solution. (I am used to Eudora and want to stick with it.)

 

I also tried to find some way to insert a delay between the checking of each account, thinking that the server might tolerate the multiple requests if there were coming slow enough. I didn't really expect to find an option to do that and did not.

 

What I ended up doing is forwarding all the very infrequently used (as in "probably never") addresses to one address. That left me with three "active" addresses. The TCH server is fine with checking those.

 

I still don't know why everything was fine with all eleven for a long time, but it's not worth worrying about.

[TCH-Thomas]

I think I have found the solution for you (ie the setting you are looking for), otherwise please disregard the attached image.

[TCH-Bruce]

Why do you have eleven email accounts that you are checking?

[redwoodhead]

I think I have found the solution for you (ie the setting you are looking for), otherwise please disregard the attached image.

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for investigating, but that setting controls how often Eudora checks all the accounts. And when all of those are checked they are checked in rapid succession.

[TCH-Thomas]

Ok.

 

I was thinking it was a "per account" setting since there is a login name field in the same screen.

 

I am not using Eudora myself so I didn´t know.

[redwoodhead]

Why do you have eleven email accounts that you are checking?

Hi Bruce,

I manage spam by creating a new email account whenever I have even a slight suspicion that the address might be abused. That way if I get spam on it I can dump it with minimal impact on whatever I am using the other email addresses for.

 

For example I use CraigsList to rent a little bit of property. When I do that I create an email address for that posting. But even after the place has rented I like to leave the email address active in case one of the responders wants to get in touch with me later.

 

I have always been spam paranoid and it has paid off. I do no filtering and get almost no spam. I like it that way and don't want to have to find another solution. (Like filtering.)

 

Now having said that I must admit that I have never had to dump an address. I attribute that to the other aspects of my paranoia being sufficient. (Like never posting what I think might be a machine readable address.) But if one layer of paranoia works I figure two is really good insurance!

[TCH-Bruce]

I manage spam by creating a new email account whenever I have even a slight suspicion that the address might be abused. That way if I get spam on it I can dump it with minimal impact on whatever I am using the other email addresses for.

Well, what I do is when I sign up for anything is create a forward and send it to my personal account. Then when I start receiving spam at that address I just delete the forward.

 

I use my email client to filter my email into different folders based on the email address it's coming too. Much easier to manage and only one connection to the server to get my email.

[redwoodhead]

Ok.

 

I was thinking it was a "per account" setting since there is a login name field in the same screen.

 

I am not using Eudora myself so I didn´t know.

That would make more sense to me. But I set it at one minute and the behavior is as I described. Oh well.

[Samrc]

I used Eudora years ago, and back then it was quite nice, but very basic. Too bad you do not have send/receove groups.

 

If your send/receive is an all or nothing, I would forward emails to a combo address. Then use FILTERS/RULES to resplit the emails to different folders. Ex: any email coming from xyz would go into xyz folder, etc. Means you would connect to less accounts during send/receive, but when replying you would need to be careful which email addy you use. (I use combination of email addresses and rules in Outlook all the time.).

[redwoodhead]

Well, what I do is when I sign up for anything is create a forward and send it to my personal account. Then when I start receiving spam at that address I just delete the forward.

 

I use my email client to filter my email into different folders based on the email address it's coming too. Much easier to manage and only one connection to the server to get my email.

Unless I misunderstand, that is what I have changed to doing. Except that instead of whittling it down to one connection I have left it at three. (One account is used for personal email. One is for businesses for which I have a high level of trust, like banks. And one is for pretty well but not totally trusted organizations, like a charity that might be a bit more casual about how they use their email lists.) The iffy ones have been getting their own addresses and those are now being forwarded to my personal account. I actually expect to get almost nothing on the iffy ones, but you never know.

 

But the personal account and the business ones I think need to be checked separately. Since those are in active use I get a significant amount of mail on each. And if, for example, I forward mail from one of the business accounts to my personal account I will end up with two copies of the mail, one in the original account and one in the account to which it was forwarded. And since I am not regularly checking mail on the business account, mail will accumulate in it and need to be emptied manually. I would prefer not having to do that. (I guess I could use something like MailWasher to delete the mail in those two accounts without downloading the mail.)

 

Now that I am on this topic, I will mention one "suggestion" I have which doesn't seem to be supported in cPanel and therefore probably can't be done. That is, have an option for automatically deleting the mail in the "from" account after it has been forwarded to the "to" account. I will guess there are good reasons to not support that, but my ideas always seem like good ones to me.

 

And one question. Is there anyway to know to which email address mail was actually delivered? The "To:" field can be spoofed, but it seems like the TCH server would know to which account the mail was delivered. And it seem like it should be possible to communicate that info to the recipient of the email, so the mail can filtered into folders totally reliably. Maybe not though!

[redwoodhead]

I used Eudora years ago, and back then it was quite nice, but very basic. Too bad you do not have send/receove groups.

 

If your send/receive is an all or nothing, I would forward emails to a combo address. Then use FILTERS/RULES to resplit the emails to different folders. Ex: any email coming from xyz would go into xyz folder, etc. Means you would connect to less accounts during send/receive, but when replying you would need to be careful which email addy you use. (I use combination of email addresses and rules in Outlook all the time.).

Thanks for the ideas. If the reasons I related in a reply to Bruce for consolidating nine of the eleven into one, but leaving two separate, make less than complete sense to you I would very interested in your thoughts.

[TCH-Andy]

Now that I am on this topic, I will mention one "suggestion" I have which doesn't seem to be supported in cPanel and therefore probably can't be done. That is, have an option for automatically deleting the mail in the "from" account after it has been forwarded to the "to" account.

Just create the forward, and not the account.

 

In terms of checking who the email was to, you can cover most with the 'to' address, those that are not correct are probably spam and can be treated as spam anyway alternatively you will have to check in the headers.

[redwoodhead]

Just create the forward, and not the account.

 

In terms of checking who the email was to, you can cover most with the 'to' address, those that are not correct are probably spam and can be treated as spam anyway alternatively you will have to check in the headers.

Umm, Bruce and Samrc's suggestions now make sense to me. I didn't realize that a forward could be setup from a nonexistent account.

 

While I may want to keep some infrequently used accounts around I can certainly use just forwards for the really junky stuff.

 

Thanks all!

[pkrohnert]

It seems like you fixed your problem, but in case you or anyone else you comes across this thread is interested, I think the real issue wasn't that you were checking 11 addresses, but that your mail client was configured to check each of them every 1 minute. I check a lot of separate TCH email accounts on the same server myself without any problems, but I have my mail client configured to check them every 5 minutes instead. Checking more frequently than that can definitely cause problems.

 

Also, as far as moving rules based on who they were sent to... I know in Outlook, you can create a rule to move messages based on the account that they were downloaded from, but that doesn't seem to be an option in Eudora. However, I think you can accomplish something very similar by creating a Eudora filter based on the "envelope-to" field in the header. The only difference is that field would show which of your 11 email addresses the message was actually sent to (as opposed to which of the 3 accounts where it ended up).

[TCH-Bruce]

Sorry I failed to mention that you don't have to create an account to create a forward email address. But Andy covered it.

 

As for email clients, Thunderbird's rule filtering works great.

[redwoodhead]

It seems like you fixed your problem, but in case you or anyone else you comes across this thread is interested, I think the real issue wasn't that you were checking 11 addresses, but that your mail client was configured to check each of them every 1 minute. I check a lot of separate TCH email accounts on the same server myself without any problems, but I have my mail client configured to check them every 5 minutes instead. Checking more frequently than that can definitely cause problems.

 

Also, as far as moving rules based on who they were sent to... I know in Outlook, you can create a rule to move messages based on the account that they were downloaded from, but that doesn't seem to be an option in Eudora. However, I think you can accomplish something very similar by creating a Eudora filter based on the "envelope-to" field in the header. The only difference is that field would show which of your 11 email addresses the message was actually sent to (as opposed to which of the 3 accounts where it ended up).

Howdy,

The one minute configuration was just a temporary setting so I wouldn't have to wait 30 minutes to watch Eudora's behavior during an interval triggered mail check. It had been set to 30 minutes and was returned to that afterwards.

 

I too have been checking a lot of TCH email accounts without any problems. Then one morning I started having a problem. I started this thread and submitted a ticket when that was suggested. TCH responded in a way that I interpreted as corroboration that accessing a large number of accounts at one time would cause problems.

 

I will go back and remove all the forwards to verify the behavior I was seeing, but probably won't be able to get to that today.

[pkrohnert]

In your case, I think the forwarders are a good solution, so I wouldn't bother deleting them and setting back up separate email accounts. I just wanted the thread to document that it is totally possible to check several accounts on the same TCH server without any issues, unless you are checking too frequently. However, since you said this only recently stopped working for you, I wonder if your server was recently moved to the TCH NOC. If so, maybe the new server/network has different security settings that are causing the problems.

 

There are some legitimate reasons to have separate accounts instead of just forwarders. In my case, it's because I need to be able to send from many different email addresses. I check over 20 TCH accounts at once throughout the day and never have any issues, but my server has not yet been moved to the TCH NOC.