Abivia requires that all email generated by a site hosted on its shared servers have a “from” address that belongs to the hosted domain. This is an anti-spam measure designed to protect the reputation of our IP addresses and ensure that mail from your site is not blocked by recipients. Some spammers have tools that will defeat Captcha verification. some just use cheap offshore labour. This allows bots to generate high volumes of mail via a website. They will enter the victim’s email address and select “send a copy to me”. In a default configuration, this is what happens: A message gets sent to the victim, with headers that say it is “from” the victim. The victim reports the message as spam. The spam reporting system flags the IP address that the message came from as having a poor reputation. This impacts mail delivery for all users on the same server. Because the from address is wrong, it is also difficult to establish the source of the spam. Any steps we take to recover the reputation of the IP address require that we certify that we’ve taken steps to fix the problem. By forcing a valid from address, we are better able to find and fix the source. A second major benefit of this policy is that it can interfere with the functioning of a hacked site. Hack scripts have to do extra work to determine what the valid outbound email address is, so they are usually sending with bogus from headers. Any message like that from our servers is rejected outright. Our recommended practice is: Set up an address for mail from your site. It is common to use something like [email protected] (replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name). You can configure cPanel to refuse inbound mail to this address. Set the “to” address to your address or your customer service address, as desired. Set up your site to use [email protected] as the “from” address. Use the submitter’s email address as the “Reply-to” address. We strongly recommend that you disable any “send me a copy” feature. Keep using some form of Captcha.

If you prefer to access your mail through Google Mail, it is possible to connect your Abivia Mail account to GMail directly. Here’s how: First, in GMail, click on the settings icon. That’s the middle gear icon in the top right corner of your GMail Home page: Google settings icon This gets you to Quick Settings. Click on the “See All Settings” button: Here you want the “Accounts and Import” tab: Illustration of Accounts and Import tab selection Under “Check mail from other accounts”, select “Add a mail account”: This will pop up a new window asking you for the email to add: Google add account screen Click Next. You will see a preselected option “Import emails from my other account (POP3)” Click Next again and get the credentials screen: Google credential entry screen The SMTP server should be mail.{put your domain here}, so mail.example.com or mail.example.ca etc. Your username is the full email address. The port number should be 995. Google will try to connect to your mail server and if successful will send you a confirmation message: GMail connection verification message That’s it. Your Abivia mail should now show up in Google Mail.

“There are many reasons why you want to protect a subdomain or directory from the public. You could be working on a new version of your website; you might want to add an extra layer of security to an in-house application like your CRM system. A good way to do this is to add a HTTP password. You can do thie either by editing a .htaccess file, or by using the “”Directory Privacy”” interface in cPanel. There’s also many reasons why you might want that same area to run HTTPS, which means you need a valid SSL certificate. If you want one of our free certificates from Let’s Encrypt, then the Let’s Encrypt servers have to be able to get past the HTTP password so they can read a validation token from a folder under the .well-known folder on your server. If you want both to work, you’ll need to add a .htaccess file under the .well-known/ directory that contains these lines: AuthType None AuthName “”None”” Require all granted Satisfy Any Allow from all This will allow full access to .well-known, but since that path is only used by Let’s Encrypt to write a temporary validation file the folder contains nothing of interest.”

“At some point, anyone with a website who is working with a third party (a web developer, a SEO consultant, etc.) is going to get asked for their “”hosting credentials”” as casually as they might get asked for their phone number. But if you aren’t working with your site every day this can be a confusing question. In this article we’ll try to help it all make some sense. In the simplest terms, this is a user name, password, and information on where to use that information. But it’s often not simple. To a great extent, the correct answer will depend on who is asking! The request could be for any of: Your domain registrar’s login. Your hosting company’s client login. Your hosting control panel login. Your hosting FTP login. Your website’s dashboard / administrator login. These forms of credential are listed in order of decreasing importance and risk. Whenever possible you should try to limit the access other people have to your accounts to the lowest level possible. Just to make things more complicated, depending on your specific setup the first three items in this list could be one, two, or three different logins. Let’s look at each and why someone might need them. Some logins also have a form of two-factor authentication (commonly abbreviated as 2FA). 2FA can range from something fairly simple like a verification question that requires personal information (for example, the name of your first pet), to a method that requires that you enter a time-sensitive code sent to your phone. If you have 2FA enabled, then you may have to relay the code to the person you want to allow into your account. We have an article that talks about the difference between many of these credentials, see Too many terms! What do Domain, Hosting, Control Panel, Dashboard, Back-end, etc. mean? for more detailed information. Domain Registration For most people, their web host and their domain registrar are the same. But there’s no reason why this has to be the case. It’s entirely possible to register your domain at Keisha’s Domain Company and have your hosting with Little Bear Hosting. Usually the only reasons why a third party would need access to your domain is if you’re transferring it to another registrar (like Abivia) or if you’re keeping the registration in the same place but moving the hosting. Exercise extreme caution when giving out credentials to your registration account. Be absolutely certain that you can trust the person you’re giving this information to, because anyone with this information can take control of your domain. Also when the work is done if you don’t have a two-factor authentication system, change your password so that access is revoked. Even if you trust the person you’re working with, there’s no guarantee that their systems won’t be compromised at a later date, potentially putting you at risk. Information needed: The registrar’s URL. User name. Password. Hosting Customer Panel Your customer panel credentials provide access to changing or ordering new services for your website, email, etc. This is also where you pay your hosting bill and create tickets for technical support. There are few reasons why you would want to provide this information to a third party. For example, if you need to modify your hosting plan. If someone is just working on your website they shouldn’t need this information. Information needed: The host customer panel URL. User name. Password. Hosting Control Panel The control panel is the place where you can create and remove email and FTP accounts (more on FTP below), add subdomains, create databases, install and configure website software, and more. If someone is building a new site for you from scratch then they will need access at this level. If they’re just updating content or performing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for you, they should not normally require this level of access. Most host control panels don’t support 2FA but that is starting to change. When the work is done, you can usually change the control panel from the customer panel. Yes, the terms can be confusing! Information needed: The host control panel URL. User name. Password. FTP Access If your developer is uploading a large volume of images PDF files, or other media, then they will likely want FTP access. For most hosting control panels, your control panel user name and password will work for FTP, but the account-level FTP credentials will also provide remote access to your entire site. Your control panel should allow you to create a new login that is restricted to the part of your account that they need. For example in WordPress, you might only want to give them access to your site’s wp-content/uploads folder. Information needed: The FTP server address and port number. User name. Password. Website Administrator/Dashboard If you’ve hired someone to improve your search results, upload new content, or make minor design changes to your site, then these are all the credentials they should need. In fact, it is a good practice to create a specific login for the people you’re working with and to only give them the permissions required to do the work you need. In WordPress you’ll need to give them an administrator account. In a more robust CMS you can usually provide more restrictive access. Besides access control, the advantage of creating a separate user account is that you can disable it when the work is done, which means you won’t need to reset your own password. Information needed: Your site’s admin URL, for WordPress this would be https://yoursite.ca/wp-admin, for Joomla it is https://yoursite.ca/administrator. User name. Password.”