What They Are and How To Use Them

Rackspace’s email hosting helps you create a custom email address (e.g. [email protected]). Using the correct Rackspace email settings, you can configure it with your email client or website.

While Rackspace’s website hosting products use a highly technical IaaS approach, its email hosting is affordable and easy to set up. That makes it a great option to pair with Kinsta if you want to set up a custom email address along with your Kinsta-hosted WordPress site.

We’ll share all the critical Rackspace settings for IMAP, POP, and SMTP in this post. Then we’ll show you step by step how to configure four popular email clients to use Rackspace email: Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail, and iOS Mail. We’ll also show you how to configure your WordPress site to send transactional emails using the Rackspace SMTP server.

Let’s dig in!

What Are the Rackspace Email Settings?

Here are the three most important Rackspace email settings you need to configure your email client or website:

Here are the details you’ll need for each.

Rackspace IMAP Settings

IMAP lets you configure your email client to receive incoming mail from your Rackspace email account. It allows two-way syncing, which is great if you’ll be checking email from multiple devices.

Here are the IMAP settings at Rackspace:

• Server: secure.emailsrvr.com
• Port: 993
• Requires SSL: Yes
• Username: Your full email address
• Password: The same password you use to log in to Rackspace webmail

Rackspace POP Settings

POP is another protocol that lets you receive incoming mail.

You can use POP if you only plan to access your email from a single device, but it’s not ideal for use across multiple devices because it doesn’t support two-way syncing like IMAP. For this reason, Rackspace recommends that you use IMAP whenever possible.

Here are the POP settings at Rackspace:

• Server: secure.emailsrvr.com
• Port: 995
• Requires SSL: Yes
• Username: Your full email address
• Password: The same password you use to log in to Rackspace webmail

Rackspace SMTP Settings

Whereas IMAP and POP help you receive incoming mail, SMTP is a protocol that handles sending emails via Rackspace. You can use it to configure your email client so that you’re able to send emails right through that client. And if you have a WordPress site, you can also configure the site to send its emails using Rackspace SMTP to improve deliverability.

Here are the SMTP settings at Rackspace:

• Server: secure.emailsrvr.com
• Port: 465
• Requires SSL: Yes
• Username: Your full email address
• Password: The same password you use to log in to Rackspace webmail

How to Configure Your Email Client With Rackspace Email

Now, let’s look at how you can use the Rackspace settings from above to configure different email clients. As mentioned earlier, we’ll cover these four popular email clients:

• Outlook
• Thunderbird
• Windows (default client)
• iOS (default client)

The nice thing about most of these clients is that you don’t need to enter your IMAP and SMTP details to use them manually. The one exception is the iOS Mail app, which will require you to provide those details yourself.

Outlook

To configure Outlook to use Rackspace, get started by opening the Outlook email client.

If this is your first time opening Outlook, you’ll first be prompted to enter your Rackspace email address:

On the next screen, choose IMAP:

Then, enter the password that you use to log in to your Rackspace webmail:

You should see a success message. Click Done to continue to the Outlook interface:

Now, you should be able to send and receive emails using Outlook.

Thunderbird

When you open Thunderbird, you should be prompted to “set up your existing email address.” Enter your Rackspace email address and the password that you use to log in to Rackspace webmail:

Thunderbird should automatically detect the proper protocols — click Done to finish the process and start sending and receiving emails:

Windows Mail App

If you don’t want to use Outlook, you can also use the default Windows Mail app to set up your Rackspace email.

To get started, open the Mail app. If this is your first time launching the app, you should be prompted to add an account as soon as you open the app. If it’s not, you can add a new account by going to Settings > Manage Accounts > Add Account.

In the list of account options, choose Other account (POP, IMAP):

On the next screen, enter your Rackspace email address and password:

And that’s it! You should be able to send and receive emails right away.

iOS Mail App

To configure your iOS device to use Rackspace email, you can use the default Mail app.

If this is your first time opening the Mail app, you’ll be prompted to add an email account. Otherwise, you can go to Settings > Passwords & Accounts > Add Account to manually add a new Mail account.

When adding an account, choose Other:

Next, enter your Rackspace email address and the password that you use to log into webmail:

At this point, you’ll be prompted to enter the Rackspace IMAP and SMTP details (listed earlier in this article). The details will be the same for both incoming and outgoing mail servers as you aren’t required to enter the port number manually:

Once you enter all of the details, the Mail app will verify them. If everything looks good, you can immediately start sending and receiving emails using the Mail app.

Troubleshooting Rackspace Email Connection Issues

If you’re having problems receiving or sending emails, here are some troubleshooting tips to help you get everything working.

Problems Receiving Emails

If you’re having trouble receiving emails, you should first try logging into your Rackspace webmail directly.

If you see the email in webmail, but it doesn’t show up in your email client, double-check your connection settings.

Make sure you entered the correct information — it’s easy to make a small error:

• Typos: Any typos in your username or password will make connection impossible.
• Port numbers: Make sure you have the correct port number for your chosen protocol. SMTP is 465, IMAP is 993, and POP is 995.

Problems Sending Emails

If you’re having trouble sending emails from your email client, here are some tips.

First, try logging into your Rackspace webmail account and sending an email directly from there. If the email works when you send it via webmail but doesn’t when you use your email client, the SMTP settings that you entered might not be correct.

If you can’t send emails from your webmail or your email client, your emails might be getting flagged as spam. Make sure you’re following all email best practices when composing your outgoing messages to avoid this.

How to Configure WordPress to Send Emails via Rackspace SMTP

If you have a WordPress website, you can also use Rackspace’s SMTP server to send your WordPress site’s transactional emails, improving their reliability and fixing issues with WordPress emails not sending.

Transactional emails are essential day-to-day emails like password resets, form submission notifications, and so forth.

Rackspace’s SMTP server has a 10,000-email-per-day limit, which means that unless you’re sending a monstrous number of messages daily, you’re unlikely to run into issues while using Rackspace for both your email client and your WordPress site’s emails.

To set this up in WordPress, the only information you’ll need is:

• Your existing Rackspace email account (you don’t need to create a new account or configure anything new in Rackspace).
• The free Post SMTP plugin lets you configure your WordPress site to send emails via Rackspace SMTP.

Let’s take a closer look at how to set it up.

1. Configure Post SMTP Settings

To get started, install and activate the free Post SMTP plugin by Yehuda Hassine. After that, go to the Post SMTP area in your WordPress dashboard and click Show All Settings to access the full Post SMTP settings area:

First, go to the Message tab and enter your Rackspace email in the Email Address area. You can also enter the name that you want to use for your site’s emails:

Save your changes and then open the area of the full settings again.

This time, you’ll work in the Account tab. First, configure the dropdowns in the Transport section as follows:

• Type: SMTP
• Mailer Type: Post SMTP

Selecting this option will expand a new set of options below — this is where you need to enter the Rackspace SMTP information. Configure these settings as follows:

• Outgoing Mail Server Hostname: secure.emailsrvr.com
• Outgoing Mail Server Port: 465
• Envelope-From Email Address: Your full Rackspace email address
• Security: SMTPS
• Authentication: Login
• Username: Your full Rackspace email address
• Password: The Rackspace email password you use to log in to Rackspace webmail

Lastly, make sure to click Save Changes:

2. Send a Test Email

Now it’s time to send a test email to make sure everything is working correctly.

Go back to the main Post SMTP area in WordPress and choose Send a Test Email:

Enter your email address and click Next:

If the configuration worked, you should see a success message:

You also should see the email in your inbox — it should display as coming from your Rackspace email address:

And that’s it! Your WordPress site will now send all of its emails through your Rackspace account.

If you’re having problems setting up the Rackspace SMTP server, you can always try another free SMTP server such as Gmail SMTP, SendGrid API, Outlook SMTP, or Yahoo SMTP.

Summary

Though Rackspace’s cloud solutions aren’t as accessible as Kinsta’s for website creation, they do provide affordable email hosting, making it a solid option for Kinsta users or anyone else looking for an email hosting solution.

Now that you know the Rackspace email settings for IMAP, POP, and SMTP, you can configure any email client to send and receive emails using your Rackspace account.

If you have a WordPress website, you can also use the Rackspace SMTP server to deliver your site’s transactional emails and improve their reliability.

Do you still have any questions about these Rackspace email settings or how to use them? Let us know in the comments section!