Do you currently have an incoming e-mail forwarding/hosting service? You will need it in order to have email that is sent to your "webmaster@yourdomain.com" automatically forwarded as described in this article so that we can automatically handle your problem emails.

If you do already have an incoming e-mail hosting service, please get your provider's Mail Exchange ("MX") setting information and let us know what it is. If you don't currently have an incoming e-mail hosting service, we recommend one of two options:

GoDaddy.com is an inexpensive and full-featured service. When you go to GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com), click on the Email menu tab and select the Email Accounts submenu. If you plan to set up only a single account for your "webmaster@yourdomain.org" address, then the 1-address option will work for you and is all you need. (Note, though, that you may also wish to get additional addresses for president@, membership@, info@, etc.--we recommend doing so to avoid having personal email addresses up on the website. This part is entirely up to you.) As of January 2008, GoDaddy's pricing for a single address is $9.99 per year, pricing for 5 addresses is $19.99/year, and pricing for up to 10 addresses is $29.99 per year. Please note that these are for actual email accounts, which goes beyond what we require; all we require is email forwarding for a single account.

A less expensive option with GoDaddy is simply to get their 5-pack of email forwarding addresses. This is only $2.95 per year for the 5-pack, and it is more than adequate for our purposes here. The easiest approach for this is to call GoDaddy at their customer service number and tell the sales representative that you want to purchase a 5-pack of email forwarding addresses. The representative will be able to walk you through the process and get you set up while on the phone.

(Note: if you have your site's domain name registered through GoDaddy, they also give you 100 (yes, one hundred) free email forwarding addresses. We only use one of them for this webmaster@yourdomain.org address; the others can be used for any other officers or functions you wish.)
 
Once you have gotten set up, you will need to:

1. Set up email forwarding for your "webmaster@yourdomain.org" address so that it is a double alias and points to both of the following two addresses:



and the email address for your organization's webmaster.

2. Provide us via your site's Support Tracker with the MX settings ("mail exchange" settings) for the service provider. These may change from time to time as the service provider adds more servers or changes settings at their operation, but the form will look something very much like:

1. mx0 - smtp.secureserver.net
2. mx10 - mailstore1.secureserver.net

There may be only one MX setting, or there may be more; please provide whatever your email service provider has for their MX settings. You can generally either call your service provider or do a search on their website for "MX records" or "MX settings"--this should get you the information we need to finish setting up your outbound email service. Please note that if you use a provider other than GoDaddy, we reserve the right to charge an additional fee of at least $125 for additional setup work that may be necessary at our end; if additional work is necessary going forward, additional fees may be charged to your account for that work. NOTE: If you are using GoDaddy, we already have their MX Settings, so you do not need to provide them to us; just make sure we know you are using GoDaddy.

Once we have set up the MX setting information on your Magnet account, we will do a test email message to confirm that email sent to your "webmaster@yourdomain.org" is received at this end via our "mailbot@omnimagnet.com" address; your webmaster will need to confirm that this test email is received at their address also. Also, be aware it can take as much 12-24 hours from the time we input your MX settings for them to propagate across the internet so that we can do this test of your webmaster email.

At that point, the service provider that we use for outbound email for our clients will confirm that everything is set up properly; we take care of this confirmation with the service provider, but note that this can only take place during regular Monday through Friday business hours (9am to 5pm.) At that point, you will be able to send your first email newsletter.

3. Every 6 months thereafter, we will automatically confirm with you that your email forwarding is still active and correctly set up. We do this to ensure that both you and we remain in compliance with anti-spam regulations. At those 6 month intervals, you will get a message when you go to your Manage Newsletter admin screen asking you to click on a link we provide there on the screen. This will generate a short test message that will be sent to your "webmaster@yourdomain.org" address. Once this is sent, we will confirm that (1) you have received your copy of it and (2) we have received our copy of it. Once we have confirmed both receipts, you will once again be able to send eNewsletters.

4. On a semi-related note, we do need to have your organization's street mail address. This will appear in the footer of your outbound email messages to your users. Please upload this street address information via your site's Support Tracker, and we'll take it from there. (Note: while you can use a personal home address, we recommend against this since this address will be included in all the emails you send out to all of your users.)