Frequently Asked Questions (AQ FAQs)
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Why Are Emails Rejected By The Receiver’s Email System? For a whole host of reasons, each one categorized in the rejection, or bounce-back, email message. The categorizations consist of a number (e.g., 550), a short text description (e.g., “User Unknown”) and often a link to a web page with more information. There are no hard standards on how these should be formed, which are left to the individual organization that issues them. In short, these can mean just about anything, but generally the link will cover the rejection reason in varying degrees of applicability and detail. From our tracking, the most common reason that emails are rejected is because the recipient is no longer at the receiving organization. The second most common reason is that the sender or the recipient, and sometimes both, are on a Public Block List. Repeatedly emailing to someone who’s no longer there can get the emailer on a Public Block List.
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What Is A Public Block List? PBL for short, a list of emails that have sent material deemed offensive in various ways, collectively known as spam. The sending emails are identified by their IP address. There are literally thousands of PBLs, most of which are reputable. Generally operated in “the public interest”, they add these spamming IP addresses to their lists in various ways, ranging from dirt simple to amazingly sophisticated. The spammers don’t worry about this because it’s not their email they are using: They hijack yours.
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What Are Hijacked Email Addresses? An email address used by a sender by anyone not actually the email address’ sender. It is amazingly easy to do and impossibl to eliminate. The easiest way to get hijacked email addresses is to use a ‘spider’ or ‘bot’ program, very similar to what search engines use for indexing and the like, and store anything that resembles a well formed email address. Those not technically inclined can, in effect, rent these programs online, with varying and often sophisticated filtering and granularity. A new email address will be hijacked within 60 seconds of being posted on a web page.
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What Can I Do If My Email Address Has Been Hijacked? Nothing.
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How Does Email Get On A Public Block List? Any number of ways:
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How Does Email Get Off A Public Block List? Entirely up to the manager of the PBL, of which (again) there are thousands. Generally, they are removed within a relatively short period of time. For what it’s worth, within 24 hours on most on the PBLs we monitor unless the activity that caused to initial listing resumes. Some PBLs charge money (a not too subtle form of extortion) but, alas, with no guarantees.
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How Does A Public Block List Affect My Email? If your email account is on a PBL (as would be all of AgentQuote’s subscribers) then your email will be rejected and bounded back if the recipient’s server subscribes to a PBL checking service.
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What If I Send An Email To Someone Who Is On A Public Block List If you try to send an email to someone whose email address is on a PBL that we check then it will not be sent.
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Which Public Block List does AgentQuote Monitor? A list of lists that you can see by going here
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How Can I Prevent Getting On A Public Block List? You cannot do anything about your email address being hijacked, but you can protect yourself (and your fellow AgentQuote subscribers) by:
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What Are Programmatic Attacks? Webmail can be manipulated by a remote program once an email account has been compromised by logging on, usually exploiting a weak password. Once they gain access to the compromised account they can generate and send new emails from that account by, in effect, entering recipient email addresses, subject and body text, and then clicking the [Send] button, without having to actually push the buttons or having to use a real web browser. And they can do this many times faster than a human can. It only takes a few seconds for that account, and all the other AgentQuote subscriber accounts, to be exposed to being listed on a PBL.
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Why Is My Email So Slow? Emails do not travel at the speed of light, nor in a straight line. Instead they hop from one server to another on their way to the recipient, in much the same way as goods are moved by truckers. In both cases, the load is temporarily unloaded and stored at each stop before being reloaded and sent to the next stop. This unloading and reloading to a local disk drive takes time. Additionally, emails are not sent in one fell swoop but instead are broken down into small packets. The destination server must receive all of the packets (which can and often do arrive out of order) before it “shows up” in the recipient’s in-box. So an email’s actual travel time depends on a whole range of things, from how full or slow any disk drive along the way may be, what alternate routing that has to be done based on intermediate hop timeouts, how much memory a server has available, and myriad other things that are unpredictable and beyond anyone’s control,
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How Can I Speed Up My Emails? There are those who will happily sell you a Service Level Agreement (or SLA for short) that claims to move emails at lightning speed. Most of these folks are also willing to sell you a bridge, so even if you aren’t from Missouri make them show you first, with at least a 30-day no cost trial period.
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Are There Any Alternative Email Services I Can Use? It is easy to move your email to another provider, such as Godaddy, while keeping your domain name portion of your email address. If AgentQuote is managing your DNS record for you then all you need do is let us know which IP address for the mail’s A-record should be set to. If someone else is managing your DNS record then have them set the mail’s A-record to that of the new email provider. In either case, make sure you copy all your emails to a local storage system before you set the A-record.
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Why Does Email Work With My Desktop(or Smartphone) and not my Smartphone (or Desktop)? The settings must be the same for both. If they are then something is wrong with your Smartphone (or Desktop) configuration, its local spam filters, the spam filters that the Internet Service Provider is using.
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IMAP EMail Settings For MS Outlook Here is how to set up an IMAP e-mail account in Microsoft Outlook for JohnDoe@mysite.com
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EMail Port Number Settings The following port numbers are available flor desktop emal client connections 25: SMTP (Standard) 587: SMTP (Alternate) 110: POP 143: IMAP 389: LDAP
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Using Godaddy's Email Service AgentQuote subscribers can use any of GoDaddy’s email services instead of SmarterMail, for both webmail and local (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) email access, while retaining their domain name. Here’s how.
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How Can My Registrar Connect To SmarterMail? To get your SmarterMail email working using your domain name, you will have to have your domain name registrar add two entries to your DNS record.
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I'm Not Getting Notifications Of Forms Being Completed By Site Visitors Submitted form data is always saved to your AgentQuote account and can be reviewed at any time by going to your back office (signing in at My.AgentQuote.com), clicking the Desktop main menu item, and then clicking the [Submitted Forms] button on the left. Notification of when a site visitor completes one of your forms is done by sending you an email to the email address on your ContactUs web page, or to your account's email address if the ContactUs email address is not used. Your account's email address is managed in your back office's accountManager, by clicking the Account main menu item.
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How Do I Add Google Analytics To My Website? Currently, AgentQuote website statistics are only by category and by month, without page level granularity. For security reasons we don't provide access to the server logs. You can track page visitors, and much else besides, by using google Analytics. You will need to get an Analytics account (at no charge), and google will provide you with an html code snippet that you'll have to add to your site. This can easily be done using you EditPencil's Analytic Configuration Tool with the following procedure.
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How Can I Increase Search Engine Visibility? Several things you can do, including providing sitemap and robot files on demand, which makes the search robots’ jobs a little easier, as well as adding google analytics to selected webpages. Any webpage can be included in the dynamically generated sitemap file, although some, like protected pages that require a login, can be excluded both from the sitemap and the robot scans through the robots file. Every webpage in the sitemap can have two optional attributes:
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How Do I Delete A Webpage? To delete a webpage from your AgentQuote website:
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What Is Drip-Marketing And How Can It Help Me? Glad you asked! We have a short, to the point video that shows how it works and how you can start using it with a few mouse clicks.
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Generating AQ2E Banner Code Snippets Banners will send their quote requests to a specific webpage URL that must contain the AQ2E TermQuoteEngine as the main element. For Proteus subscribers, a Term Quote Engine webpage must be added to their website; Indy CodeWidget subscribers must specify the URL, usually when they signed up for the AQ2E service. Use the following procedure to generate AQ2E banner static HTML code snippets.
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Adding an AQ2E Banner to an Existing Proteus Website Banners will send their quote requests to a specific webpage URL that must contain the AQ2E TermQuoteEngine as the main element. Proteus subscribers must have a Term Quote Engine webpage included in their website. The banner’s HTML code snippet is obtained by using the Generating AQ2E Banner Code Snippets procedure. Typically, these are then pasted into a temporary file (e.g., NotePad), particularly if additional editing is required (e.g., adding spacing elements, styling information, etc.). Use the following procedure to add a banner HTML code snippet to a Proteus webpage.
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Editing A Banner’s HTML Code Snippet The recommended practice for editing any editPecil HTML widget is to first copy the code into a working working area, such as NotePad, making changes as required, and then clearing the code editor before copying the edited snippet back.
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How To Change Your Webpage’s Name In The Browser Tab and Title Bar If you want to change the name of your webpage which appears in the tab of your web browser and in the titlebar (the top left corner of your browser window), you will need to change your webpage’s PAGE NAME. This is accessed in your website’s EditPencil by signing in at my.agentquote.com. Click on Website in the top left corner, then under Page Manager (Edit A Page) click on the name of the page you wish to edit. When the editable version of that page appears, click on the PAGE SETTINGS button directly above it. In the Page Settings window, type your new webpage name into the box under PAGE NAME. This must be alphanumeric and no more than 70 characters. Each page on your website should have a unique name. This will provide the webpage’s title description for the TITLE TAG in the HEAD section of the page’s HTML code. The TITLE TAG (or Page Name) is an important component of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and is often used to list content-related keywords which are page specific. The Page Name can be changed this way at any time. You can also input the Page Name when you are Creating a New Page.
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How To Change A Website's Background Color The only directly editable way to make global changes that appear on every webpage of a Proteus website is by adding a style script to the end of the footer section. This can be done in the editPencil by selecting the home page and clicking the footer section’s [Edit] button, which opens the footer’s editor, where the background color declaration as a style script is appended to any other text or script declarations that may already exist:
<style>body{background-color:#rrggbb;}</style>
where rrggbb is the desired background color’s red-green-blue hexadecimal value.
Color charts can be readily found on the internet, such as this one for web-safe colors.
A description of this procedure, including screen shots, is available in a downloadable PDF document
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