Sending Email

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.

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.

You can also use SSL (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.

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.

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.