The following topics address the most common issues that customers are contacting us about, including specific information that resolves the issue in many cases.

How to Create a Vacation Message

Many of you have wondered where the old "Vacation" option that used to be in Webmail has gone to. It now lives as the "Autoresponder" option in your new Plesk Control Panel. Here are a couple important tips about this:

• When you create a new autoresponder it looks like you have to fill in a whole bunch of stuff, which is intimidating. Actually though all you have to do is fill in the "Autoresponder name" for example "Vacation Message," and the "Reply with text" box which is basically what you want to say, like "Hi, Susie here. I'll be on vacation until July 20. I'll respond to your email when I get back."
• After you click "Finish" to create the new autoresponder, you'll see that it has a yellow circle with an exclamation point next to it. That means it hasn't been switched on. You MUST switch it on, just click on the "Switch On" icon above to do that. Then the icon should turn green.
  

Send/Receive and Username/Password Popup Email Issues

If you are having difficulty accessing your email through a program such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Windows Mail, etc., here are some fixes that are working well for most folks. Try them in the order listed and check your email after each step before moving on to the next.

#1: The first is to check that your username uses all lowercase letters. It also needs to be your full email address, not just the part before the @sign. Make sure that it contains the '@' symbol and not a '%' symbol.

You may also need to change your incoming and outgoing mail servers to 'mail.brainstorminternet.net'. Both of these settings can be found in your email account setup screen within your email program.

Our website contains email setup instructions for various email programs at our Account Setup page. Remember to click 'Apply' and/or 'OK' as you make these changes so that they are sure to be saved.

We recommend that you fully close your email program after making these changes, then re-launch it again before clicking the Send/Receive function to confirm that the changes were successful.

#2: If your email program is not able to retrieve all of the email that you can see in Webmail, for example if the program will only download messages through a certain date, or if it skips over messages in a date range, or if it displays the message "downloading 1 of xx messages" but never completes, we recommend the following procedure:

• Close your email program.
• Log into Webmail.
• Copy the entire content of your inbox to a temporary folder, so the inbox is empty.
• Restart your email program and check for messages. This should complete successfully.
• Close your email program again.
• Copy the contents of the temporary folder back to the Inbox.
• Restart your email program and check for new messages. This time all messages should download (you may get duplicates of some messages already downloaded).

Inability to Send Email Errors

• Error 5.5.4
• Relay Access Denied
• One of the recipients was rejected by the server

In the old system, you were not required to have smtp authentication enabled to send within the Brainstorm family.  However now this is enforced for all recipients.  This is a setting (checkbox) in your email account setup in Outlook or whichever email program you use. Please see http://www.gobrainstorm.net/SMTPAuth for instructions to set this up in your email program.

Webmail

• Webmail Address Books - Most address books have been restored. Some customers have created secondary address books labeled 'Private Address Book'. These private address books are not yet migrated but will be as soon as possible.
• Message deletion - We have restored the default delete behavior (put the message into the Trash rather than put a line through it).
• Vacation Notices - Vacation notices are no longer in webmail. Vacation notices are now called 'autoresponders' and can be found in your Plesk Control Panel. To learn more about your control panel, click on the following link (also available from our home page): Plesk Control Panel (New!)

Website Hosting

• Hosted Websites - If you are noticing an issue with your hosted website please report this to support@brainstorminternet.net for prompt handling.
• Web Statistics - Website statistics have been restored to fully functional as of June 30, 2010. The problem involved the actual logging of hits, so stats will be under-reported for May and June, but should be accurate from July 1 on.

Manage Your Account

While you can still use 'Manage Your Account' for billing and payments, it is not functional for managing your email accounts.

Contact Us

We are still very busy trying to answer your phone calls and respond to your emails. Our online support request is the most efficient method of getting your information to us so that we can respond to you as quickly as possible.