Using hotmail and departments

[crazyfish]

I'm looking at using the hotmail service with my own domain, but can I use that and still use the departments to auto create the tickets when someone emails support@mydomain.com?

[BionicInternet]

Hmm.. Without sounding harsh, why on earthwould you want to do that. Keep your support desk as it is and keep the pipe for say "support@domain.co.uk" goiong to the support desk on WHMCS

[crazyfish]

For the push mail to my PDA, this feature would be extremely useful to me.

[BionicInternet]

Well why not just buy the WHMCS Mobile Mobile - instead of using hotmail and making your business look a little "noobish" like

[crazyfish]

Push email has nothing to do with whmcs mobile. And why would it look noobish? It's still my domain name, none of my clients would notice a different mail server even if they went looking in the headers of the email. If you don't know the answer to my question please don't respond with useless info about how I should run my business.

 

The problem is to set this up my server wouldn't be used as the mail server anymore so I'm not sure how I could check the mailbox on an external server.

[BionicInternet]

Either way, this can't be done - it goes to the pipe and then stays there.

[MACscr]

lol, a hosting company using hotmail. Thats hilarious. Hosting companies using google for email is bad enough, but at least they have a good system, hotmail is a huge pain the arse for all hosting companies.

 

Anyway, why do you feel you need to use hotmail for your pda? Whats wrong with any other email account for it?

 

Just a note, if you dont want the opinions of others (positive or negative), you probably shouldn't be posting questions on the internet.

[crazyfish]

Who said I was a hosting company? I do web design and use whmcs for billing. It would be for my domain not my clients. Not sure why everyone cares so much about what I do, how about you worry about yourself. Does no one read? Twice I have say I want to use it for the push email to get instant email since my cell phone providers system has a 15 minute delay in pushing email to my phone.

[redrat]

Hosting companies using google for email is bad enough, but at least they have a good system, hotmail is a huge pain the arse for all hosting companies.

Whatever. Using Google Apps I have eliminated spam by 99.999% and can offer service to my clients even if my mail server goes down. It's far more amateur if that happens than it is to use the higher grade mail servers and technology that I get from Google. My own mail server is now 100% redundant and I really don't see what is wrong with outsourcing anyway as long as it improves resources?

 

@crazyfish

Who said I was a hosting company? I do web design and use whmcs for billing. It would be for my domain not my clients. Not sure why everyone cares so much about what I do, how about you worry about yourself. Does no one read? Twice I have say I want to use it for the push email to get instant email since my cell phone providers system has a 15 minute delay in pushing email to my phone.

They can't read.

 

The answer is that, yes, you can use Hotmail in the way you would like to. Just make sure that you don't have it blocked and you're set to go. I use Google Apps in exactly that way with great success and not a single issue so far. There is, however, an opening up of potential security vulnerabilities that you might like to consider by allowing Hotmail accounts to have any automated access to your services via WHMCS. But, as a designer, I would imagine that this will not be a problem for you. Best wishes.

Edited November 15, 2008 by redrat

[brianoz]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I read and reread your posts above and it wasn't clear how you were planning to use email. So long as @hotmail.com isn't visible in emails from or to yourself, I can't see a problem, but you will of course tar yourself as a major noob if you visibly use @hotmail.com in a hosting or design business.

 

I'm assuming you want your incoming tickets to go to your hotmail account? Simple, just set up a WHMCS users to have the address used by hotmail.com (ie @hotmail.com) and tick the appropriate support categories in the user definition. The other option is that you can forward email addresses from your domain to your hotmail.com. So, several ways to solve your problem; a clearer statement of the problem would result in a clearer solution (for example, is it correct that you are planning to use email@yourhostingcompany.com for your email but forward it into hotmail.com; if not, what are you actually doing ... )

[crazyfish]

I would be using me@mydomain.com the only place hotmail.com would show up is in the headers of the email as the mail server. Which knowing most of my clients now of them would look there or even notice it.

 

You can setup these types of services with gmail and hotmail. The big different is hotmail works more like an exchange server allowing me to instantly push mail to my windows mobile phone, instead of having to your my cell carrier's horrible service which has a 15 minute delay, randomly stops working and stuffs "Sent from Telus" in the footer of my emails.

 

I've been using hotmail for my personal account for a few weeks and the deliver to my phone is great.

[redrat]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I read and reread your posts above and it wasn't clear how you were planning to use email.

I guess because I am doing exactly the same thing only using Gmail I just assumed that crazyfish would be doing the same only using Hotmail. It was otherwise a little ambiguous to anyone else I guess but we are all singing from the same hymn sheet now anyway. Coolio.

 

I have all of my domain's email accounts (17) set up with Google apps using my own domain name and, with the exception perhaps, as crazyfish points outs out, that Hotmail's Exchange server functions take what Google currently offers re cell phones and push mail and extends it further, they are each, otherwise, much the same thing nowadays and very useful obviously.

 

With that one proviso, there is little difference between them and both are easy to set up for use in WHMCS using main domains. EG: Whilst I do not use piping, though I could do very easily, I use support@mydomain.com, billing@mydomain.com, cs@mydomain.com, etc., and Google handles it all faultlessly for all departments in WHMCS.

 

It really is a very good method and offers some handy advantages over using my own mail server to such an extent that I am chuffed to bits about it. There has never once been a single issue and as near as damn it no spam! My colleagues and staff love GoogleApps as well and the mail application (brandable) is way better than anything else I've tried, not least for collaboration. Awesome.

Edited November 16, 2008 by redrat