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

Manage Account Restored for Email Management

We have restored the Manage Your Account email functionality. Customers who have regular internet accounts can use Manage Your Account to create new email addresses, change usernames and passwords, and set up forwarding.

Folks who wish to change settings for their own email address can user our Plesk Control Panel to change their password, set up forward and mail groups, and create Autoresponders (Vacation Messages). Just log in with your regular email address and password.

Folks who have their own domain(s) can also log in to our Plesk Control Panel to manage all the email addresses at their domain(s). Just log in with your domain username and password.

New Barracuda Antivirus Definitions had a Bug

Barracuda Central released new antivirus definitions on May 24 which had a bug in them. The bug blocked incoming emails from getting through. This bug affected all ISP's using Barracuda Spam Firewall, including Brainstorm. After a couple hours Barracuda realized the problem and fixed it. However during this period there were email delays.

Email Upgrade

Our new Email server is up and running as of 11pm Friday April 15. We are excited to bring online a much faster and more powerful server with substantially more capacity.

Update: As of April 19, we have discovered a few minor glitches, all of which have been corrected. You may have experienced one or more of these problems:

• Duplicate emails. Up through Monday evening April 18, some of you may have received duplicate emails. This was due to a sync error on the new server. That has been corrected and there should be no more duplicate emails.
• Missing Address Books in Webmail. Initially, address books were missing from webmail, that has been corrected and all address books have been restored.
• Mailing Lists. Early on there was a minor glitch with the mailing lists, but that has been corrected and all lists are working now.

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:

• Click Here to get to your Plesk Control Panel login screen. (You may have to accept a certificate first) Then click on Autoresponders.
• 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.
• To turn off the autoresponder, log back in and either click on "Switch Off" which will turn off ALL autoresponders, or, if you have more than one and just want to switch one but not the other off, you can click on the green button to the left of each autoresponders. That will turn the button red with an X in it and disable that autoresponder. You can also just remove it.
  

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.

Antivirus Protection

Although Brainstorm provides antivirus scanning for all email going through our Barracuda system, we recommend that all customer have a full time antivirus program running on their computer. If you do not have an antivirus program, and have Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7, we recommend the free Microsoft Secrutiy Essentials.

Contact Us

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.