There are several pieces of information about your account that you should have:
Contents:
Accounts and domains
Control Panel
Account Password
Managing the web site
Subdomains
Creating Mailboxes
Forwarding and group addresses
Default mail routing
Spam Filtering
Webmail
Email Client
Generally, one account contains one domain, but if you have several domains they may each have their own account, or they may be part of one account, depending on how they are to be managed.
Each account contains at most one website, and one set of mailboxes. If you have several domains within one account then all of those domains will point to the same website, and the same set of mailboxes.
For example, lets say you have yourdomain.com and yourdomain.co.uk both within the same account, then http://www.yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.co.uk will point to the same website (which you can upload using either name). If you had set up a mailbox called anyone, then mail sent to either anyone@yourdomain.com or anyone@yourdomain.co.uk would end up in it.
You can access the control panel for your account by going to
http://control.yourdomain
where yourdomain can be any of the domain names in your account.
When asked to login, you should enter youraccount and yourpassword.
You can also login the same way at http://control.babbacom.net if you want to.
Your control panel will give you information about your account, and depending on the facilities you have available in it, will allow you to do things like set up mailboxes, manage spam filters etc.
You can change your account password using the option on the front page of the control panel. If you change it you are the only one who knows what it is (it's one way encrypted). If you forget the password you will have to ask to have another one set up.
There are 2 ways to maintain your website.
If you want to use MS FrontPage 2002 and extensions you can set this in the control panel. This means that you then have to use Front Page to upload and maintain your website.
By default FrontPage extensions are turned off, in which case you would use ftp to manage your site. Any ftp client program can be used to do this, including the command line version built into recent versions of windows, but a graphical client makes things easier. If you don't have one already then FileZilla is an excellent free program for Windows.
An ftp client requires 3 pieces of information to connect. These are:
Note that your website will not automatically be backed up unless we have some special arrangement in place to do that. It's up to you to back it up using the "Backup Website" facility in the control panel.
(If you don't know what subdomains are then you should skip this bit).
It is possible to set up subdomains, but each one has to be set up as a separate account, which makes them a bit harder to manage. If you want to set up subdomains for web redirection then make a list of the subdomain names that you want, and where you want them to point to, and email them to support, or email asking for more details if you want more control over them.
You can also use subdomains to manage different sets of mailboxes within a domain (think of the way Demon use mailboxes of the form user@account.demon.co.uk, for example).
The system for naming mailboxes can seem a little confusing at first, but it is logical as long as you remember that mailboxes are mapped to an account, not a domain.
To create a mailbox, click on "Email Account", "POP3 Mailboxes" and "Add Mailbox". The POP3 username is what you want to have before the @ in the email address, and the password you enter is the password for this mailbox. Unlike the account password, this isn't encrypted, and you can always look it up again if you forget it.
Having created one or more mailboxes you will then see a table headed Mailbox and Username. In this list the Mailbox is the name of the mailbox (i.e. the part before the @ in the email address), and the Username is the unique name that identifies the mailbox across the all accounts on babbacom.net. After this point, mailbox name means the part before the @ and mailbox username means the unique name that looks like name@youraccount.
Forwarding allows you to forward mail sent to an address elsewhere, either to a mailbox within the account, or to any address. When you add a forwarder the alias is the address being forwarded from, and the destination is where you want the mail sent. So an alias of abc means that mail sent to, for example, abc@yourdomain.com could be forwarded to xyz@somewhere.else.org, or to the bcd mailbox that is normally accessed as bcd@yourdomain.com.
Group addresses are similar, but allow a list of recipients (i.e. destinations) to be entered against a single alias. This allows you to create simple mailing lists. For example, you could set up an alias of team that would forward mail sent to team@yourdomain.com to several people, some of whom might have mailboxes in yourdomain.com and others might have addresses elsewhere entirely.
Obviously, you cannot set up an alias for forwarding or a group that has the same name as a POP3 mailbox.
Functionally, forwarding appears to be identical to a group address with one recipient. The only effective difference is that it is easier to set up and review a forwarded address.
You can set what happens to mail that is sent to addresses that don't exist by clicking on the "Default Routing" link. This is set to Bounce Mail by default, and you should leave it like that unless you have a good reason to change it, as any other setting can cause your domain to receive a lot more spam.
Bounce mail doesn't mean that the mail server will send out a bounce email to the apparent sender of an email, which would be extremely irritating to anyone whose address had been spoofed by a spammer. It actually means that it rejects the email before it is even sent.
Spam filtering is an extra facility that is not provided by default. If you start to receive spam and want to add filtering to your account then please contact support.
[More info about spam filtering will be going in here]
You can access your mailboxes over the web using any web browser.
To open a mailbox go to http://webmail.yourdomain or http://webmail.babbacom.net
You will be asked for a username and password. The username is the mailbox username (i.e. name@youraccount) and the password is the mailbox password (not the account password).
N.B. Some corporate networks block access to any site with webmail in the name. There's not a lot we can do about that.
You can also access your mailboxes using any POP3 email client on your machine, such as Outlook or Thunderbird.
For Thunderbird, create a new email account by using File/New/Account, and selecting Email Account. Fill in the names based on the examples in the wizard. When asked, the server type is POP and the incoming server is mail.babbacom.net. The incoming username is the mailbox username (name@youraccount). The outgoing name can normally be left the same as the incoming username (to be honest, it's not at all obvious when the name entered here would ever be used).
For sending mail, you would normally use the SMTP server provided by your ISP. If your ISP is babbacom.net, or you want to use the babbacom.net smtp server, then its name is smtp.babbacom.net. If you use this server and babbacom.net is not your ISP then you will need to log in using the mailbox username and password.
Note that you should normally use your ISP's smtp server.