UNDERSTANDING HOW YOUR EMAIL SERVER ACCEPTS CONNECTIONS FROM YOUR PHONE / COMPUTER OR TABLET AND HOW WEBMAIL DIFFERS
The mail server is a central shared service that maintains a list of all email accounts created by each domain using cPanel for your account or other users on the same mail server.
RECEIVING EMAIL: The mail server accepts emails from the world if they are sent to a valid email address and pass RFC compliance checks. The mail server stores the email files in your cPanel account in maidir format and puts new emails into IMAP folders such as Inbox or routes it to whatever folder define and indexes them in date received order. You can view logs for all email received using your cPanel / Email / Track Delivery which shows email being received is processed and routed and how email sent was accepted.
READING EMAIL: How you read email is entirely dependent upon the system you choose but the device is only a window to reading the email on the server the server is device agnostic.
REMOTE SYSTEMS: For cell phone or laptop or tablet you connect to the mail server from your ISP or WISP assigned IP address and your device must be properly configured to the correct email account and password and ports settings so the device can connect to the correct mail server and over the correct Inbound Port: 993 If your device can connect to the server and passes the correct email / password credentials the mail server will pass authentication and permit your device to read the email.
WEBMAIL: We also provide webmail at webmail.yourdomain that you can access from any web browser and only requires you enter the email account and password. Upon authentication of email and password the webmail reconnects over https via port 2096
VIA CPANEL: You can also view webmail directly via your cPanel without any email passwords using the master cPanel session but still opens webmail over port 2096
SENDING EMAIL: Sending emails is the same principal the server itself is device agnostic and sending is where your device connects to the server over port 465 before passing the email name and password credentials for authentication prior to the server accpepting the mail for sending. The only nuance relates to Email acceptance because because Webmail does NOT inject your local browser IP address into the mail headers it uses the servers default IP as the source whereas an external device like a phone or laptop does embed your local IP address into the connection source within the email headers and can affect email deliverability if your ISP is on an RBL list or has a poor reputation. This nuance has nothing to do with sending email and only relevant to mail that was sent being rejected by the recipient and is not relevant to your case.
CONNECTION ISSUES: The mail server must have ports open accept your connection but those same ports are exposed to the entire world. We use advanced Imunify 360 threat detection suite that determine if an activity is abusive and logs it and adds the offending IP to the firewall system to protect the server from abuse or malicious activity. These systems are critical to ensure the server availability. Otherwise brute force or denial of service attacks would render the server unusable and they also protect your email account from spammers.
The firewall system logs all the incidents. All we need is the IP address and we can search the logs and identify if there's an event, the logs do not tell us what device that is making the connection but it does tell us the date and time and the system being connected to and from that we can identify if there's an abuse condition occurring.
The firewall can be triggered due to any number of conditions such as incorrect credentials in their device, causing failed authentication errors aas too many connections per second for https for a website or smtp for sending or imap/pop3 for receiving, failed FTP authentication, caldav authentication, too many simultaneous HTTP connections from the same IP such as if someone has 50 windows open for the same website from the same IP, too many failed wordpress or external database connections.
The server will eventually interpret that as an attack and apply a temporary firewall rule typically for one hour. If multiple temporary bands continue the security system will add the offending IP to a permanent ban list.
In order to provide assistance in troubleshooting an issue, we need a few simple key pieces of information and for you to do a few simple things you must include when you open a support ticket:
1. Location label and ISP: We don't need every location your having issue with we need a single case to simplify the environment so pick a location that is causing the problem and IDENTIFY it with a label ie: house ISP, office ISP, mobile carrier dataplan ISP and provide the NAME of the ISP used.
2. the IP address of the connecting system: ? if the device has a browser you can go to lowesthosting.com/ip and provide it. Note if your ISP uses DHCP were they dynamically allocate your IP address? If the IP address changes constantly that will break a session and cause connectivity issues so make sure that the IP is stable
3. the email account used: ? (just pick a single email account. We will focus on it for sending and receiving)
4. the system used to connect to the server ie phone, coputer running macmail or windowsmail or outlook etc and its mail server and port settings
5. the type of error received. connectivity or authentication
6. Provide the date and approximate time and time zone that you attempted to connect to the mail server and we're blocked.
Once we have this information we will tripple check the firewall and all other systems to confirm if it was blocked and if NOT then have you run a port based traceroute.