visionunveiled.com

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For future reference, the permanent address of this page is skel.niner.net/?domain=visionunveiled.com.

Welcome, and thank-you...

Thank-you very much for choosing to host visionunveiled.com with NinerNet Communications™. We're here to help you get started with your venture onto the Internet. In fact, we've spent over a decade building our reputation on helpful and personalised service, something you don't often find on the Web these days.

To prevent you from being overwhelmed with information, we've tried to distill the vast resources available on the Web to present the bare necessities below. We hope the following information will get you started without delay:

Read NinerNet™ documentation
Build your website
Combat spam with a web-based contact form
Use your web-based control panel to set up email accounts and manage your hosting
Set up your email program to send and receive your email
Access your email through the Web from anywhere
Contact NinerNet™

Read NinerNet™ documentation

Documentation to assist you in using all of NinerNet's services can be found on our website at:

Documentation index

Build your website

If you are not planning to contract a design firm or a professional designer of some sort to put your website up at www.visionunveiled.com, you may be planning to "do it yourself". The Web is full of information, documentation and tutorials to help you do this, but at some point you have to take the bull by the horns and simply start the job. As with many things, it helps to have at least some background knowledge first, and for that we recommend the following HTML primer:

HTML primer

Once you've absorbed (or at least skimmed) that information you can dive right in with a plain-text editor and start coding the raw HTML (which stands for hypertext markup language) if you are technically-minded, or you can use a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") HTML editor that works like a word processor. We recommend a free program called KompoZer:

Other useful software that we recommend, depending on your needs:

Web Browser: Firefox (free)
Use this standards-compliant browser not only to test the web pages you create to see how they will look in a web browser, but use it all the time for safer, more secure browsing of the Web.
Text Editor: Notepad++ (free)
This is a plain-text editor that is like Notepad on steroids. It has spell checking and syntax highlighting to make coding HTML a breeze.
FTP: FileZilla (free)
FTP stands for "file transfer protocol", and unless you're using a WYSIWYG editor that does the job for you, you'll need one of these programs to transfer the files (HTML, graphics, etc.) that you create to your web server.
Graphics: GIMP: The GNU Image Manipulation Program (free)
If you need to create graphics or optimise photographs for your website, this is a great program to use.

Combat spam with a web-based contact form

Your pre-configured contact form

We strongly discourage the use of unprotected email addresses on websites, due to the proliferation of unsolicited bulk email (aka spam) and viruses/worms that are propagated through the automated collection of email addresses from websites. A simple program to use with a web-based contact form has already been uploaded to your server and is pre-configured to be used with the "info@" address on your domain. (You will need to create this address using your control panel. [See below.]) Here is some sample HTML code that you can copy and paste into a web page that will get you started with a working form, or you can just link to and use (and modify, if you wish) the basic contact page that has already been uploaded to your server:

<form action="/cgi-bin/sendit/sendit.pl" method="get"> <input type="hidden" name="_config" value="ninernet" /> Name: <input name="Name" type="text" size="50" maxlength="100" /> <br /><br /> Email address: <input name="Address" type="text" size="50" maxlength="100" /> <br /><br /> Subject: <input name="Regarding" type="text" size="50" maxlength="100" /> <br /><br /> Message:<br /><textarea name="Message" rows="10" cols="60"></textarea> <br /><br /> <input type="submit" value="Send it!" /> </form>

You can further customise the program if you wish something beyond this basic but very useful functionality; please see the read-me file, the examples file, and the FAQ file for more information. You can get further support on the authors' website if you need it. (The program is called TFMail.) Should you decide to customise it, the program (sendit.pl), configuration (ninernet.trc) and template (.trt) files you will need to download from your server and edit (using a plain-text editor) are located in the cgi-bin/sendit directory that you will see when you log in via FTP. (See the "Build your website" section above for information on FTP and plain-text editors.) Please ensure that you do not delete or modify the .pm files in that directory, as these are necessary for your contact form to function.

Use your web-based control panel to set up email accounts and manage your hosting

Your hosting account comes with a web-based control panel that you will use mostly to set up email accounts on visionunveiled.com, but which also has many other functions to help you manage and monitor your hosting account. You can access it at:

Your control panel (http://cp.visionunveiled.com)

Here are some links to documentation and tutorials to help you get started:

Create a POP email account (video tutorial)
Create a mail forward or redirect (video tutorial)
Control panel manual

Set up your email program to send and receive your email

Again, if you use Windows on your computer, you're probably already using one of the free email programs that comes with it -- Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail. Another alternative is the similarly-named Outlook which comes with Microsoft Office. Better, safer, and more secure programs that we recommend include a free program called Thunderbird:

These are the settings you will need to use:

User name: This is your full email address (including your domain), not just the part before the "@" sign.
Password: This is the password you used when you created the email account in the control panel following the steps in the previous section.
Incoming (POP) mail server: pop.niner.net (or imap.niner.net if you want to use IMAP)
Outgoing (SMTP) mail server: smtp.niner.net

There are four (and a half) issues that we commonly deal with regarding email, all problems with sending email and all related to anti-spam measures either installed on your server or used by your ISP:

Your email program might be configured with the wrong SMTP port: If, when trying to send email, you receive an error displayed by your email program that refers to a block list, your email program is not configured correctly. Please see the instructions for configuring your email program and go through your settings very carefully to ensure that your email program is correctly configured to use port 465 over SSL for SMTP -- i.e., sending email through the outgoing mail server. If you do not have this configured correctly, your email program will use the default public SMTP port (25), and you will very likely be blocked from using this port to send email.

Your ISP might be preventing you from using your own SMTP server to send email: Some Internet service providers (ISP) use an anti-spam technique called "port 25 blocking". If you find that you can connect to your server to download incoming email, but you cannot connect to send outgoing email, this may be the cause. Our instructions already take this into consideration, bypassing your ISP's blocking of port 25. Please ensure that you follow these instructions carefully.

An anti-spam technique used on your server might be preventing you from sending email: NinerNet™ employs an anti-spam technique on your server called "POP before SMTP" to prevent spammers and other unauthorised people from using your mail server. This technique requires that you successfully manage to check an existing email account on your server for messages (even if there are no messages in the account) before you are then allowed to send email through your mail server. Once you have successfully checked for mail, you are then allowed to send email from your IP address for a period measured in minutes -- usually 20. If, when you try to send email, you get an error message that refers to "relaying" or says, "Sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts", then you need to check your email account (i.e., check for new incoming messages) and then try again to send your outgoing email. To avoid running into this error you can set your email program to check for incoming mail every ten minutes (if you have an always-on Internet connection), or make sure you check for email as soon as you connect and before sending (if you have a dial-up connection).
- Bounce messages from "System Administrator": If you receive a bounce message -- i.e., an email telling you that a previous email you sent was undeliverable -- referring to the above error message ("Sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts") from "System Administrator", it was not sent by NinerNet™! You probably don't know it, but by installing AVG anti-virus on your computer, you have also installed a mail server. This "mail server" intercepts your outbound mail and then submits it to the NinerNet™ mail server. Unfortunately, this generally invisible process cuts out an important part of the immediate feedback loop, leaving users of AVG thinking that we are blocking their email or that we have a "problem" on our mail server. The problem is actually with the way that AVG deals with scanning outbound email and the fact that AVG tries to hide this process from you. In so doing it lulls you into thinking that you have successfully submitted your email message to the NinerNet™ mail server, when in actual fact you haven't. Regardless of all of this background information, the solution is the same as above: Please make sure that you successfully manage to check an existing email account on your server for messages (even if there are no messages in the account) before you send email through your mail server. The messages that bounced will need to be resent. (By the way, for this and other reasons we do not recommend AVG anti-virus software. We recommend and use Avast, which also has a free edition.)
Are you using Outlook 2002?: Outlook 2002 has numerous known issues, both with SSL connections and with remembering passwords. Because of all the problems associated with this version of Outlook, we cannot support its use with the email services provided by NinerNet™. Please either upgrade to a more recent version of Outlook (or even downgrade to an older version) or use a different program altogether. (To find out what version of Outlook you have, click "Help" then "About Microsoft Office Outlook" [the exact wording may vary] in the help menu.)

Access your email through the Web from anywhere

It's a good idea to use a proper email program (as described in the previous section) to send and receive your email and store it on your own computer. This is more secure and gives you complete control over your email, and is a lot more efficient than using any web-based email system currently in existence. However, for those times when you are away from your office or home, your account comes with a web-based email interface that can be accessed using any web browser:

Your webmail (http://webmail.visionunveiled.com)

As when setting up your email account on your own computer, please be sure to log in using your full email address (including your domain) as the user name, not just the part before the "@" sign.

Here are some links to documentation you might find useful if you wish to change the default configuration of the web-based email for an individual email account:

Webmail FAQ

Contact NinerNet™

When you need help, we'll be here. This is where you can find us:

NinerNet Communications™ (home page)
NinerNet™ support
Contact NinerNet™

You should also be aware of and familiar with the legal agreements and policies governing your hosting and domain registration:

Legal notices and agreements