Email Troubleshooting

Things to check before you call!

If information below does not answer your questions please call the
NCKCN Tech Support @ 1-800-841-6500.
 They are open 8:00 am to 8:00 pm 7 days a week

(Information below was taken from NCKCN web page)

Q. I 'm having trouble sending email. I get an error that says '550' Server does not accept direct email. Set your email to  use SMTP. What's wrong?
    You need to set your email software to use the correct servers. For POP3 set it to "pop3.nckcn.com". For SMTP, the setting has to be "smtp.nckcn.com". You can look at our on-line guides for help.

Q. I 'm having trouble e-mailing my friend in Wichita. What's wrong?
     On the Internet, it doesn't matter where someone lives, they may be connected to "tinbuktu.net" and travel across the world to reach you. You need to give us information we can use to solve your problem. For example, to specify that I can’t get email from/to user456@hotmail.com is much more helpful.   Having said this however, 99% of email errors are simply incorrect addresses. Email addresses have to be exact, as does your return address. No spaces, extra characters, periods, anything! If you are trying to email joeemailuser@somewhere.com then your address has to be joeemailuser@somewhere.com. If the person you are emailing can't reply to your messages, you probably have your return address incorrect. Lastly, if the message is returned to you, almost always it will have the reason for the failure. If it is never returned, probably the other end user has something incorrect. You know, the old "Return to sender" routine.

Q. Can I use my e-mail from anywhere?
    Yes and No. You can check your email from any other place in the world, but you won't be able to send out with a local email client such as Outlook Express. This is an anti-spam feature we use at NCKCN.  To check your email, all you have to do is set you email software to point to your NCKCN account. We do offer a Web based email solution where you can check and send NCKCN email from anywhere in the world, not just on the NCKCN system. You can use any Web browser to point your browser to http://webmail.nckcn.com/ .

Q. I can't get my email. It seems to be stuck. What's wrong?
    Sometimes email gets stuck and you can’t do a thing about it but have me clear it out. The usual culprit is a spammer who knowingly sends unwanted email without an end-of-file character or EOF. I can’t for the life of me think why they do this except that they don’t care in the first place what problems they cause.

Spam is a real crisis on the Internet, and it wastes a huge amount of bandwidth and is an invasion of privacy. Unfortunately legislation is slow about doing something about it. One of the security measures to prevent spammers; is to limit the number of recipients that can receive an email. Another security measure is to make sure whom-ever has sent you an email is really who they say they are by looking to see that the reply address is legitimate. We also have the capability to block known spammer addresses. We do all of this to make your Internet life much more secure.

Sometimes you get just too much email packed into your account! It’s like never emptying your mailbox and the mailman just keeps stuffing and stuffing until it’s so wedged in you can’t get anything out.

Possible reasons for this situation are:

• Changing the default settings of "deleting messages from the server" to "saving E-mail on the server". This is a bad idea all the way around. Not only can it cost you if you run over your storage, but it makes you, us, and the Internet download your messages each time; all of them!
• Non-use of your E-mail account, thus having too many messages pile up.
• Someone sending large attachments on several E-mail messages (our severs reject anything over 2MB per message)
• Usually we will  attached your email as one document for you to read if it could be rescued. Otherwise we would have had to "nuke" it completely.

Q. I can't dial in with my new extra Commercial Email Account. When I dial in with it, I get an invalid password. What's wrong?
     Your additional Commercial Email Accounts are not dial-in accounts. You will use the same dial-in name you have always used and simply set up your email software to connect to your new account. For example if you have been using "widgets" to dial in to NCKCN and send and receive email with that account, then request to add another Commercial Email Account  named "gadgets", you will still use the "widgets" account to dial into NCKCN. You can still get email with "widgets", simply add the "gadgets" email account configuration to your email software. Outlook Express lets you do this very easily as it is a multi-account email package.

Q. I want to send someone a large graphic that is over 5MB, but I don't want to attach it as email. I'm sure that would be the wrong thing to do. What do I use to send the graphic or make the graphic smaller?
     First of all a thank you is in order for your proper concern and understanding of email etiquette, and not attaching huge files. You have a two part question:

The proper application to use to transfer files is FTP (file transfer protocol) which is a normal and established function of the Internet. Just like you can get different browsers for the web, or different email software for email; there are many FTP clients (software) available. One of the best places to download that is TUCOWS. Simply read the instructions on how to use FTP, or look at our "How TO" pages for information. In fact you have probably used the FTP protocol many times without even knowing it. Web browsers can use FTP to download files to you.

The other part is sending the correct (smaller) graphic file format. You really want to use a compressed format like "gifs", or "jpegs" which are the file format you view on web pages. They are designed to be much much much much...well you get the idea.. smaller than a "raw" Windows bitmap, (.bmp, or .wmf) file. Again, it's just a matter of using the right tools for the job, and one of the best places to look to download an image editor or graphics application that allow you to change the format of graphics is at TUCOWS.

If you consistently need to transfer large files after you have compressed and do all you can to use the proper application, and still they are larger that your allocated Internet space. We are more than happy to set up a "semi-public" ftp site, (in addition to your secure site for web pages if you have one), so you can transfer/share (in accordance to the policies of NCKCN which you will find in your web and ftp sites) files to your hearts content :^) Your new FTP site cost runs in blocks of 10MB. If you need a 10MB chunk, it's $5.00/month for each block, or for a 20MB block, it would be $10.00/month etc...  If this sounds like the ticket, just drop the webmaster a note.

Q. How can I stop a spammer from sending me email?
    We have several ways to stop spam (or UCE as it is known). We use the RBL servers on the Internet that are designed to block specific known spammers.  Literally millions of known spam addresses as well as some entire domains that are notorious for hosting spamers are being blocked right now. We also do not allow email to be relayed through NCKCN. This prevents spamers from sending email as an NCKCN member. We are also actively blocking hundreds of domains from ever reaching your NCKCN mail, but it still isn't enough. The best way to help stop a spamer is to block the sender from reaching you by setting your email software to reject the unwanted spam. You can follow our instruction for Microsoft Outlook Express on how to do this at http://www2.nckcn.com/NCKCN/HowTos/BlockSpam.htm.

Another way to protect yourself is to never reply to a spam message that asks if you want to be removed from this list if you return the email.  DON'T do it! This is just a way for them to verify your address! If however, you can go to a web site to remove your email address, still be careful, but it will most likely work. Note: This is a change in our way of blocking spam to a more active role on your part to help us combat this scourge of the Internet.

If the offending email is too persistent, we can take some pretty drastic measures and block the offending address or site from even reaching NCKCN. This should be used as a last resort however as it will block them from everyone else at NCKCN. You need to attach a copy of the offending email (the whole message, by saving it to a location on your hard drive, then attaching it) and sending it to: postmaster@nckcn.com . You need to attach a copy instead of just forwarding or copying it into another email and sending it on as most spammers use fake addresses, however the original email will have a timestamp on the headers of the attachment to allow us to track down the culprit. You can also view the Properties of the email and copy the Internet Email Headers and paste that in an email to postmaster@nckcn.com.

You can attach the offending email by simply selecting the email, (not opening it), from the Inbox. Then select the File menu and the Save command. Save the email messages on your hard drive where you know where it is such as the Temp folder. Address an email to us at postmaster@nckcn.com , then simply attach the saved email by clicking on the paper clip and navigating to the saved email.

To copy all the email headers, you must select  the offending email and make sure it is highlighted in your Inbox. Then select the File menu and select the Properties command. This will bring up a dialog box with a General tab and a Details tab. Click on the Details tab. Now select the text in the Internet headers for this messages box and copy this to  with Ctrl + C, (the Windows "COPY" keyboard shortcut),  and paste it into a an email to postmaster@nckcn.com with Ctrl + V (the Windows "PASTE" keyboard shortcut)

Q. I received a message saying that I sent someone a virus or email and it's being blocked. I never sent any email to this person or address. What is going on?
    This is an increasing problem over the Internet. What has most likely happened is someone is infected with a virus or spy-ware that has your email address in their computer. Their computer is now sending out it's payload as you. But you get the returned blocks and error. Unfortunately there is not much you can do since it's the other culprit responsible. You can however simply block the return from a specific user in your Postini Filters.

Q. How do I know how much email space I am using?
    All NCKCN members get 5MB of space. To explain how the space limit works: If your email space limit is reached, email sent to you will be returned with a "Mailbox has exceeded disk quota" error. To make sure this doesn't happen simply keep downloading (checking) your email on a regular basis as you should do anyway You won’t have anything to worry about. Again, since every time you do check your email, it empties out your email mailbox. If you are in the practice of abusing the email space limits, you might have to alter your practices and check your email more often. On thing to ABSOLUTELY NOT  do is set your email to save a copy on the server. This is an incredibly bad idea, and one to surely fill your email space very quickly. You can't use your Outlook Express to check to see how much email you have, because when you do check it, it simply downloads your email to you off the server. So it's kind of a catch-22 situation. However, you can use our Web Mailman to check and send email from any web browser. Simply point your browser to http://webmail.nckcn.com/ .

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