Mail service: frequently asked questions


Go back to the service main page

Go to your member area, log in and click on “Mail service”.

A blue navigation bar should appear at the top of the page.

  • You can create, modify or delete mailboxes in the “Email Management” tab.
  • You can create or delete aliases in the “Alias management” tab.

You have two options:

  1. Use the webmail integrated to our Nextcloud service from your member area (or your own webmail if you have one)
  2. Use any email software. Here are some of them, the free software are written in bold:

To add an email address to your email client, look for an option to add an existing email account, then enter your full email address (created on the email service) and the password you entered. Do not enter your login credentials for the member area, they are not the same and will not work.

The configuration should be automatic. If it is not, you will find below the necessary information for a manual configuration:

ParameterValue
Host name / servermail.42l.fr
PasswordYour password entered in “Email Management”
Port993 (IMAPs), 995 (POPs), 465 (SMTPs)
SecuritySSL/TLS (or implicit TLS)
Authentication methodNormal password

For advanced users, we also support STARTTLS for IMAP (port 143) and POP3S (port 110) as well as SMTP (port 587), but we recommend using implicit TLS.

We have set a number of limits on the use of our service, in line with our technical and human resources devoted to its maintenance.

About the maximum number of mailboxes and aliases: by default, we offer 5 mailboxes and 60 aliases. But if you need more mailboxes or aliases, you can contact us via our contact page and we’ll increase these limits free of charge. Remember to specify your alias in your email.

Regarding disk space: there is a strict limit of 1 GB per mailbox.

Ideally, each of your mailboxes should weigh no more than 100 MB. If it exceeds this size, please try to clean up, retrieve your mail from your computer, empty your recycle garbage can… Or create another mailbox. A 100% full mailbox can no longer receive e-mails.

In most e-mail clients, such as Thunderbird, you can set up automatic mail archiving to transfer all mail older than 3 months, for example, locally to your computer. This will considerably reduce the load on the server.

When it comes to sending large volumes of e-mail: we’ve set a few limits on the volume of e-mail you can send.

  • No more than 20 recipients in a single email ;
  • No more than 30 recipients in 20 minutes;
  • No more than 80 recipients in 12 hours.

Our mail server is not designed to be used for a newsletter or to send a large number of e-mails simultaneously. For this purpose, we have another mail server, dedicated to mass mailing and suitable for newsletters. For more information, please contact us.

You can also use third-party services to send newsletters, but you’ll need to configure your domain name (DNS entries) accordingly.

The management of a classic mailbox looks like this :

Diagram representing a bad management of its mailboxes

Your personal and professional emails are mixed, you receive spam, you have only one address for all your activities…

We suggest you to create aliases that allow to relay your mails and to protect your real address:

Diagram representing a bad management of its mailboxes

This way, nobody knows your real address and you can create and delete aliases at will.

This also prevents more powerful actors (states, or large companies) from linking your identities with your email.

Ideally, you should create an alias for each service. When you have to give an email address to a third party, give your alias. That way, if that address is ever used to send you spam, you can simply delete the alias.

The question was raised during the January 2020 General Assembly. The answer is yes: when your membership expires, you will keep an access to your member area and you can continue to add and delete email addresses as before.

However:

  1. If financial needs are too great on our side, or technical limitations (especially storage) are at stake, this choice could be reviewed during a General Assembly.
  2. If this should happen, we will not close the door in your face overnight. We will do our best to give you several months notice.

We intend to specifically maintain this service for as long as possible (as long as the association exists and there are people to take care of it).

Nevertheless nothing lasts forever. But if we ever have to close this service, we will give you several months notice, if possible.

We do not rule out any possibility, but it is unlikely that this will be possible as we would like to avoid our server being used for spamming purposes. Condition the access to the services to members is often a sufficient guarantee to prevent malicious use of our service.

However, once you are a member, nothing prevents you from creating email addresses for your relatives with your account.

Yes, you can! You can create a mailbox from your account and give them a login, or create an alias on your account to their email address.

But it would be even better if your relatives would decide to join the association, it would help us to finance our activities! So, please don’t abuse it.

Just contact us. You will remain the owner of your domain name, but you will need to add some DNS entries (SPF, DKIM, DMARC…) in order for it to work properly.

We will guide you through the configuration of your domain name.

We do not keep any copy of your data once deleted, except for those kept in our regular backups which are deleted after a certain time.

We may be able to recover some of your emails from our backups (contact us), but please do not make such a mistake.

Above a certain volume of e-mails, we don’t allow newsletters on this service to protect other mailboxes from significant reception delays due to the sending restrictions applied by the major providers (Gmail, Outlook…), see the question “What are the service usage limits?”.

However, we have set up a newsletter service on a different server, configured to send emails to several hundred people. If you are interested in this service, please contact us.

Our webmail is available at webmail.lacontrevoie.fr.

  1. Go to webmail.lacontrevoie.fr from your browser.
  2. In the “User name” field, enter the e-mail address you wish to consult. This e-mail address must be hosted on our servers. Please do not enter your account name on our member area, as this will not work.
  3. Enter the password for this e-mail address (each of your mailboxes has a different password).
  4. Click on “Login”… and voilà!

Unlike most conventional filters, Sieve filters act on e-mails as they are received on the server. They apply on all devices that consult the mailbox, not only the webmail. This makes them ideal if :

  • you want to set up an automatic out-of-office message;
  • you are using several different e-mail programs to connect to your mailbox, and would like to sort incoming e-mails without reconfiguring them on each program;
  • you’d like to set up a mail redirection to another mailbox (it’s best to use an alias for this, where possible).

Note that there are many tutorials on the Internet for setting Sieve filters on Roundcube. These tutorials can be applied to our webmail.

  1. Connect to the mailbox of your choice.
  2. In the Settings section, click on the Filters tab. Click on Create.
  3. Enter a name for the filter.
  4. Define a rule on which the filter will be applied: a subject, a sender address, a date… you can specify several rules, and choose to apply the filter only if the e-mail corresponds to one of them, or if the e-mail corresponds to all these rules.
  5. Select the desired action. Some examples:
    • Move e-mail to: Choose a folder, created beforehand, to which the e-mail will be automatically moved when received;
    • Reply with e-mail: Enter an automatic reply to be sent when the e-mail is received;
    • Send a copy of the e-mail to: Enter an e-mail address to which a copy of each e-mail received will be sent, corresponding to this rule;

Screenshot of the Filters section with pre-filled fields for automatically resending an out-of-office message

Save your changes. The filter is now permanently active. If you wish to deactivate it, return to this interface and uncheck “Filter is activated” in the filter options.

Managing multiple mailboxes in a single session (without having to log out and back in) is a feature that is unfortunately not well supported by our webmail.

Recommended alternatives are:

  • install a mail client on mobile (K-9 Mail) or computer (Thunderbird), which are designed for this purpose;
  • gather all your incoming mail into a single mailbox, using aliases (mail redirections) and filtering rules to automatically move mail into dedicated folders.

But if you really want to, you can configure our webmail to manage several mailboxes:

  1. Log into a mailbox that will act as the “main mailbox”, in which we’ll save the other mailboxes.
  2. In the Settings section, click on the Identity tab.
  3. Create a new identity by entering a display name and the email address of a new mailbox:

Screenshot of the Identity section, with a new identity being created

  1. Click Save, then select your new identity and activate the Identity data section. Enter a display name and the password for this mailbox:

Screenshot of the Identity data section, with pre-filled fields

  1. Save. In the Email section, you should now be able to access your other mailbox from the same session:

Screenshot of the dropdown menu in the Email section

This feature does not yet provide a “unified” mailbox. If this is a necessary feature for you, we recommend you look at the alternative solutions outlined above.

Warning: to manage the inbox filters of the “secondary” mailboxes you’ve added in the Identities section, you’ll need to log out of your main mailbox and connect individually to these secondary mailboxes to manage their respective filters.