JANET Web Mail Service

About the Service | Applying to Use the Web Mail Service | Service Contact Details | Application Form

About the Service

JANET(UK) provides an e-mail service to organisations that do not have the resources to support one themselves. It has agreed a contract with RM to provide a JANET Web Mail Service (based on RM EasyMail Plus), which is centrally funded for the Specialist College and ACL sectors. Since the start of the service, we have received a lot of interest from other part of the JANET community. JANET(UK) has therefore agreed with JISC to extend the offer to the wider JANET community as a chargeable service. [Go to tariff].

The JANET Web Mail Service uses a standard web browser for receiving and composing e-mail messages. This means that users can send and receive e-mail from any computer with Internet access, and mail is stored and processed at the data centre where the Web Mail server is located. Individual users will be identified by an e-mail address in a format that can be recognised across the Internet such as:
jblock@yourorganisation.ac.uk.

The first part of the address is a user name, allocated by the administrator at the organisation. This can be something like J.Block, or Joe.Block or jb2004. The second part of the address, after the ‘@’ sign, is the domain name which identifies the organisation on the Internet. The domain name of an organisation that uses the service may be arranged by JANET(UK) or by another service provider.

The service lets authorised individuals at each organisation administer the creation and deletion of user e-mail accounts. The normal limit on the amount of e-mail stored for each user name or account is 20MB. If an organisation has a particular need for a different amount of storage, they should discuss it with JANET(UK).

The major features include:

Secure domain administration web site (requiring Internet Explorer v5 or later), for the creation and deletion of individual e-mail accounts.
Flexible mailbox sizes to allow a domain administrator to allocate mail storage space as required by the user community of their organisation.
Facility to create and amend users in bulk, based on lists managed (for example) in a spreadsheet.
Group support to enable a domain administrator to allocate users to groups (for example by subject, tutorial group) and define group-specific restriction lists and other settings as required.
Banned word filtering to enable an organisation to prevent e-mail messages being sent that may contain offensive words.
Restriction list functionality to enable a domain administrator to restrict the destination of outbound e-mail to particular domains, and to restrict the source of inbound e-mail to particular domains (provided the web-based user interface is used).
Anti-virus and anti-spam protection built-in (provided the web-based user interface is used) to reduce the threat from virus attacks within an e-mail, and to reduce the amount of ‘spam’ mail received by users.
Support for 4MB attachments.
Mailbox usage indicator to easily see how much personal mailbox space has been used up.
Access the Web Mail service using a POP3/IMAP client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook Express). However, using this feature e-mail messages will bypass anti-virus and anti-spam protection built-in the service.
Support SMTP authentication to allow e-mail sent from a known mail client within JANET.
An HTML text editor.
Create mailbox filtering rules for easier management of incoming email.
User-changeable password to allow users to take control of their mail account security.
Import and export contacts to the address book to improve the efficiency of address book management.
Out-of-office reply to notify the correspondents of one's unavailability.
Step-by-step online support for end users.