Our IMAP mail servers now support “special use” hints for Sent and Trash folders

Our IMAP mail servers now support the IMAP LIST Extension for Special-Use Mailboxes. That means we send hints to your IMAP mail program suggesting it should store copies of sent and deleted mail in the “Sent” and “Trash” mail folders on the server, rather than a different location the program might randomly choose.

Without the hints, some mail programs default to storing copies of sent and deleted mail only on your local computer or device. Those copies can’t be seen by other programs or devices, and they aren’t saved in our backups. You could always change that manually, but with the hints, some mail programs — particularly macOS Mail and iOS Mail — will now automatically save the mail to server folders with no extra configuration needed. The copies will then be visible on all the IMAP devices you use, and they’ll be saved in our backups.

What if I don’t want my mail program to use these folders?

In our testing, this change doesn’t affect mail programs that are already storing sent and deleted mail on the server in folders you’ve specified. But if your mail program does change where it stores sent or deleted mail, and you don’t like the change, you can use your program’s settings to explicitly choose where you want sent and deleted mail copies to be stored (for example, this page describes how to set folders on an iPhone or iPad, and this page describes how to change folders for the macOS Mail program).

If your program doesn’t offer that feature, another option is to delete the “Sent” and “Trash” server folders from your mailbox (or ask us to do so). That will prevent any hints from being sent at all, making things work exactly as they did before.

SSLv3 disabled on our webmail servers

We’ve updated the SSL/TLS security settings on our webmail servers to match current “best practices” for security, disabling “SSLv3”.

Our customers shouldn’t notice any changes. (We made this change on our main website some time ago with no reports of problems, and many of the largest sites on the Internet have done the same.) We’re just mentioning this so that people know to contact us in the unlikely event they do have any trouble.

That said, if you do have any trouble, it’s probably because you’re using an outdated, insecure web browser that you should update. You can check your browser by visiting www.howsmyssl.com. If you can’t update it, using a different browser on your computer will probably help.

Our mail servers now use stronger SSL/TLS settings

We’ve updated the SSL/TLS security settings on our mail servers to match current “best practices” for security.

Our customers shouldn’t notice any changes. We’re just mentioning this so that people know to contact us in the unlikely event they do have any trouble.

That said, if you do have any trouble, it’s probably because you’re using outdated, insecure mail software that you should update. If you can’t update it, but the changes prevent you from sending mail with the “SSL” option turned on in your program, you may need to turn off the “SSL” option for outgoing mail until you can update.

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