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## Becoming Familiar with Your Control Panel

This section describes the items located on your Home page and gives an overview of the operations you can perform on your mail account and services you can subscribe to. When you need to perform a specific operation, we suggest that you refer to the table of contents to quickly find the instructions you need.

You can do the following with your mail account:

- Use it as a standard mailbox, protect it against spam and viruses, and send/receive mail through a mail client program installed on your computer (via SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols), and access your mail through a Web interface.
- Use it as a mail forwarder to one or several recipients.
- Use a vacation notice when you are away and will not be able to check your mail.
- Use a number of automatic responses that will activate under certain conditions.
- Use any combination of mail services, for example, have a mailbox that will keep your mail and forward the message copies to other addresses.

Now let's take a look at your Home page.

The navigation pane is located on the left. It contains the following shortcuts:

- Home. Click this shortcut to get to the main screen from which your control panel session starts.
- Sessions. Click this shortcut to view the list of users currently connected to your control panel and have a chance to disconnect them. The control panel allows concurrent sessions, and if you are collaborating with someone on managing your mail account, you can see if that user is currently logged in to the control panel, how long he or she has been there, and how much time the user spent in the control panel without performing any actions.
- Global Account. This shortcut appears in your Plesk Control Panel when the single sign-on capabilities are switched on the hosting server. Single sign-on technology allows you to log in to different Parallels products using a single global login name and password. This shortcut is used for changing the global login settings.
- Log out. Click this shortcut to log out of control panel when finished working.
- Help Desk. This is where you can report your problems to your provider.
- Help. Click this shortcut to open the online help.

Below the Help icon there is a context help tip area, which gives you brief descriptions of operations you can perform on the control panel screens. When you place the mouse pointer over an icon or another control panel element, the context help tip provides additional information.

The main work area is located on your right. The Info group shows the information on services currently used on your mail account. An icon shown in color indicates that the service is activated, and a grayed out icon indicates that the service is not activated. The icons in the Info group correspond to the icons located in the Tools group and they are clickable, so, for example, when you need to set up an automatic response, you can click either the Autoresponders icon in the Info group or the Autoresponders icon in the Tools group.

The Tools group provides the shortcuts to the following functions:

- Preferences. Change your password for access to control panel and your mailbox. Select a desired interface language and theme (skin).
- Permissions. See what actions are allowed for you to do by your service provider.
- Mailbox. Switch off the mailbox function, if you do not need a mailbox on this account. You would want to do this, for example, if you are using this e-mail address as an e-mail forwarder and would not like the mail system to leave the copies of forwarded messages on the server. Switch the server-side spam filtering (provided by SpamAssassin software) on or off.
- Redirect. Set up mail forwarding to another e-mail address.
- Mail Group. Set up mail forwarding to multiple e-mail addresses. You can use this function as a simple mailing list.
- Groups. View the mailing lists to which you are subscribed.
- Autoresponders. Set up automatic responses.
- Spam Filter. Set up spam filtering for your mailbox, and improve spam filter accuracy by teaching the spam filter on messages in your mailbox.
- Antivirus. Set up antivirus protection for your mailbox.
- WebMail. Read your mail and compose new messages with Horde web mail application.

The Mail aliases group at the bottom of the screen shows additional e-mail addresses associated with your mail account: you can have a number of alternative e-mail addresses that will point to your mail account. These e-mail aliases can be used as disposable e-mail addresses.

For example, you have a primary e-mail address your.name@example.com and one disposable e-mail alias nickname@example.com, which points to your mailbox at the primary address your.name@example.com. When you, say, register on a forum, you specify your e-mail alias nickname@example.com, which can be used to contact you and may be visible to other users. Once you start receiving junk mail, ask your provider or server administrator to remove that alias and create a new one: this way you stop spam without losing your primary e-mail address your.name@example.com.

Note: You cannot create and remove e-mail aliases from your control panel. Refer to your provider or server administrator when you need to have an e-mail alias.