Sending Email
Overview
We provide outgoing email services to:
- Customers using us for their internet connection (eg DSL, L2TP, FTTP etc). (No authentication required, no domain required.)
- Customers with a domain and email services (authentication required if not using us for your internet connection)
| Outgoing email settings (Sending email) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Server | smtp.aa.net.uk | This is the server used for sending email from you to anyone else. |
| Port | 587 | port 25 may be removed in the near future |
| Security | STARTTLS | |
| Authentication | Optional | If you are sending from outside an AAISP connection, then you will need to use your mailbox username and password to authenticate. You will also need to enable STARTTLS |
Sending email means that you use an email program of some sort to compose an email and send it. We will accept the email from you and send it on to the right destination. We do check the email you are sending does not have a virus or look like spam and will return an error to you if it does. To send an email you need to configure your email program to use the gateway smtp.aa.net.uk. This is actually several powerful email servers.
Sending email from outside the AAISP Network
You can normally only send email via our email gateway if you are connected via our internet service. If you want to use it from elsewhere you can use authenticated email sending where you configure your email program to use your mailbox (email address) as the login, and your mailbox password as the password. This then allows sending of email from any internet connection via our servers.
Encrypted Communication
You should use STARTTLS (encrypted link) to connect to our mail servers for sending email or the submission port. These are usually options on most applications in the same place as you configure the mail server. If you are concerned about security you may like to look in to PGP encrypted email which would allow you to send emails only the recipient can ever read.
Webmail Accesss
You can also log in to our web mail system to send email from a web page if you prefer. We recommend Thunderbird as an email program for your computer. It is free, and available for Windows, Linux and Mac systems. Thunderbird has an option to also hold local copies of email. This is a good idea as we cannot guarantee to never lose your stored email, though we take every effort not to.
Using your own mail server
We would recommend that customers using their own email servers send email directly using MX records rather than to use us as a 'smarthost'. Our servers are configured not to relay bounce messages, as this often causes problems for other Internet users.
Running a mailing list?
For customers that run their own mailinglists we would ask that you not send these messages through our mail servers but instead use the features of your mailinglist software to send directly or to use your own mail server. This is due to the main cause of our mail servers being blacklisted is due to customers running mailing lists.
More Details on Sending Email Restrictions
See Outgoing Spam Restrictions
Retry
If a message cannot be delivered at the first attempt - eg if the remote mail server is busy or gives a 'soft' fail etc we will retry as follows:
- For the first 6 hours, we'll try every 5 minutes
- For the next 16 hours we will retry around every hour
- Thereafter we will retry every 6 hours for the next 4 days
- after 4 days we will give up and bouncing it back
During this time, we will send automated emails saying that the email is delayed.
If the remote server outright rejects message or if there is some other permanent error, we will bounce the message back right away and not retry.