Your new exmsft.com account

July 2, 2015 by

If you were given a link to this page after requesting an exmsft.com account then it’s been set up; welcome to the ranks.

Please read this entire page.

You now have a new email address of the form oldalias@exmsft.com, where “oldalias” is your old Microsoft alias. I have no control, influence or information on what happens to your actual alias@microsoft.com address, but I assume that it exists only while you are employed there, and will begin bouncing shortly after you leave.

Terms of Service

Please also read: exmsft.com Terms and Policies.

Join the Facebook Group

You may now request membership in the exmsft.com group on Facebook, if you are so interested, for server status updates. (Important: if you asked for membership prior to getting your exmsft.com account, send email to info<at>exmsft.com and ask again. Because of the large number of bogus attempts we now ignore membership requests for people that don’t already have an exmsft.com account.)

Remember this website

exmsft.com should be your first port of call when you have questions, especially the FAQ. If you can’t find your answer here, drop me an email, or hit the Facebook group.

Configure your email client

Short version:

Important: your exmsft.com comes with a quota, currently 50 megabytes. That means it will only hold so much email before bouncing messages sent to you. Make sure to configure POP3 downloads or fetches often enough and without “leave message on server” configured so as to not approach the quota. Do not use IMAP.

Please understand I can provide only limited support helping you configure your POP3 access. This is something you’ve likely had to do in the past for other email accounts, so it’s nothing new. Besides, you used to work for Microsoft – I’m sure you can figure this out. 🙂

Recommended: Using Gmail to access exmsft.com email

My recommended approach to accessing your exmsft.com POP3 email account is to use a Gmail account. (Other email services – such as Outlook.com – may work, but I can confirm Gmail works, since it’s what I did for a very long time.) This is perhaps the best spam filtering option out there, and it’s free.

You will need a Gmail account if you don’t already have one.

Configure Gmail to fetch exmsft.com email using Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Check mail from other accounts (using POP3). Do not leave messages on server.

Configure Gmail to “send as” your exmsft.com address if you want to. Gmail will offer it as part of the process of setting up the POP3 fetch, above, or you can add it manually in Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send mail as.

Once configured this will automatically place all your email into your Gmail account, and you can then access that Gmail account however you like (web, mobile, desktop and so on). If you go all-in, you can send and receive using your @exmsft.com email address.

If you’d like more details on the process, the article How do I route my email through Gmail? out on Ask Leo! may help.

Using a POP3 client to access exmsft.com email

You may, of course, use any POP3 email client of your choice. Outlook, Thunderbird (what I’m currently using) … whatever you like. You’ll be relying on those program’s spam filters to filter out your spam.

Do not allow email to accumulate on exmsft.com. That means:

  • Do not select “leave messages on server”
  • Download email frequently enough that it doesn’t accumulate

A word about spam

Spam is the nemesis of exmsft.com. It’s why we no longer allow forwarders: it made our server look like it was sending spam as spam gets forwarded, resulting in the server getting blocked by several recipient domains.

Spam is handled one of three ways:

  • The most egregious spam you’ll never see. It won’t reach your account.
  • Server-identified spam will be routed to a spam folder in your account on the server. These folders are not downloaded when you access your account via POP3. In order to check what’s in these folders you’ll need to use the webmail interface. Note that spam in these folders older than 14 days is automatically deleted. This email does count against your quota as well.
  • A fair amount of spam will make it through to your inbox for you to deal with. (This is why I recommend using Gmail: it will further spam-filter this email as it’s picked up).

At this point there are no per-user spam settings for the server’s spam filter (spamassassin). There’s only a global setting which is set relatively lax to avoid legitimate email from being flagged as spam as much as is reasonable.

SLA

In hoity toity terms, that’s “Service Level Agreement”.

I need to set expectations. There aren’t any.

Exmsft.com is provided on a best-effort basis by a volunteer (who also foots the hosting cost), and should not be relied on for anything super important. Our best-efforts have been great for many many years, but I just can’t promise that there won’t be problems in the future. (Typically spam related. If you browse older articles on the site you’ll see.) And while I try to respond quickly, I can’t be 24/7.

The best way to use exmsft.com is as a way for people to find you. You can then direct them to your real email address at a real email provider.

Filed Under: POP Accounts