Running a small business on the Isle of Man can be an expensive thing to attempt. You see thanks to the extortionate cost of many essential services your overheads can be much bigger than you’d expect. The same was true for me when I started this, one of the biggest costs was for broadband. I wasn’t expecting Manx Telecom to charge so much more to business customers for what is essentially the same service as what their domestic customers get. Thankfully in recent times competition has emerged and that’s exactly what I planned to take full advantage off.
I did manage to source a MUCH cheaper basic business ADSL service through WiManx. A fairly new company on the Isle of Man but one which it appears will do very well (I recommend them to everybody now). Customer service and support was great and I was up and running in no time. However a problem soon came to light, my original Manx Net e-mail address. I’d used it as a business contact address when I first started out and although my contact details had been changed for a while the odd person would still contact me by it. The problem is that Manx Telecom only allows POP access to their e-mail accounts if you’re with them as an ISP. It’s probably one of the stupidest, most paranoid business decisions I’ve seen. To make things even worse their web mail interface is crap enough to almost be unusable. I had a problem, but what can you do?
I write e-mail forwarding software as a living so that got me thinking, if there was no POP access maybe there was a forwarding option hiding away somewhere in the webmail interface. Eventually I found it, it’s a great solution to this stupid problem and if anybody else is with another ISP but still wants access to their Manx Net Email then this is how I’d suggest you do it:-
- Sign into your Manx Net Email Account
- Click “Options” (top right hand side)
- In the left hand menu select the bottom option “Message Filters”
- Use the “New” option (top left)
- Create a new filter where the “From:” contains a “@”
- Set a “Forward To” action and put in the address that you want your Manx Net mail delivered to
- Save it. Once saved use the up arrow to position your new rule above the default spam rule
That’s you done, from now on any new messages that arrive in your Manx Net mailbox will automatically be forwarded to whatever address you specified, no more having to use that nasty web interface. Just one other note, and that’s that the original messages are not kept in Manx Net so make sure that the forwarding address you specify is valid.