Checking Your Webmail (Dreamhost)

[Updated 2005]

It is often convenient, when travelling without a PowerBook or when you only have access to another person’s machine, to check your email via the web. If you are using Dreamhost as your website and email provider, here are some instructions how to do it and caveats to keep in mind.

– Any contemporary web browser (including Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer) will work.
– To ensure you are online, try going to a common website such as Google.com or Yahoo.com. If you can connect to either of these, you are online.
– Go to the location http://webmail.[yourdomain].com. For instance, if your company’s website is http://www.company.com, your webmail address would be http://webmail.company.com.
– You should get a very simple page with either your company logo or the SquirrelMail logo with a login and password field below.
– Enter the first part of your email address as the login. For instance, if your email was “john@company.com,” your login would be “john.”
– Your email password is the same password you use to check email from your main work computer. If normally you use Apple Mail, Entourage, or Eudora to check your mail in the office, you may not know this since the mail password would have been entered for you when the application was last configured by one of our staff.
– To obtain your email password, please either send an email to your client support address a day or two before you will need access or call the Support Centre for assistance over the phone.
– After logging in, you will be brought to your inbox. You can read and respond to email here using the relatively simple interface.

Some Webmail Features and Drawbacks to Consider
– New folders your create (and mail filed in them) through webmail may not be visible to your regular mail reader when you get back to your normal office machine, so please resist the urge to clean up.
– You will likely see more spam through webmail than you see in the office. This is because your mail application may be doing an additional level of spam-filtering and hence you are viewing the webmail before this filtering occurs.
– The sent mailbox will only show mail sent from webmail, not from your regular mailbox.

Passwords in Particular
You will see a link on your login page that allows you to change your email settings, including your email password. We recommend against changing anything in here without discussing it with one of our staff first, but if you are committed to changing your password please consider two important points:
– If you change your password, you must remember and note down what you change it to. While can reset it for you again in the future, this will involved a delay of up to several hours and could prevent you from accessing your mail for a while.
– If you do change the password through webmail, your office mail application (eg. Apple Mail, Entourage, or Eudora) will no longer retrieve mail unless you change the password back or go into the settings on in your office mail application and update the passwords for incoming (and outgoing) mail servers read this.