Shared Hosting Mail - SSL/TLS Required from 1st Sept 2026

At Web Wiz, we are committed to keeping our shared hosting mail platform secure for every customer. As part of this commitment, we are disabling plain-text (non-SSL/TLS) connections to our shared hosting mail servers.

What is Changing?
From 1st September 2026, our shared hosting mail servers will no longer accept unencrypted connections. Every connection - IMAP, POP and SMTP - must be secured with SSL/TLS or STARTTLS. We support the modern, secure protocols TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3, so your mail is fully protected in transit. The mail server ports are not changing; only unencrypted sessions on those ports will be refused.

This change affects how you connect to send and collect your own mail. It does not affect normal delivery of incoming mail from other senders, which continues as usual.

Why is this happening?
We are seeing a high volume of brute-force login attempts against mail accounts, the majority of which target plain-text connections. In this day and age there is no reason to send your email username and password unencrypted across the internet. By requiring SSL/TLS on every connection we significantly reduce the attack surface and better protect your mailbox credentials.

What You Need to Do
Most modern email clients, such as Outlook, use SSL/TLS by default, so many customers will need to do nothing. This includes MAPI and EWS connections, which are already secure. If you connect using older or manually configured settings, please check your email client before 1st September and make sure it is set to use an encrypted connection. The correct host names and ports are listed here: Email Settings (IMAP, POP, SMTP, EWS, MAPI & CalDAV)

If you use Webmail, there is nothing to do - Webmail already runs over a secure HTTPS connection.

Sending Mail from Classic ASP (CDOSYS)
If your website sends email using Classic ASP CDOSYS, please be aware of an important point. CDOSYS has a long-standing bug in its STARTTLS handling: when configured for the STARTTLS port (587), it can send the connection in plain text rather than upgrading it to an encrypted session. Once unencrypted connections are disabled, scripts relying on this will fail to send mail. To avoid any disruption, CDOSYS scripts must use the explicit SSL port 465 with SSL enabled. A full working example is available here: Sending Mail Using Classic ASP CDOSYS

Need Help?
If you need help reconfiguring your email client or updating your scripts, please open a support ticket and our team will be happy to assist.

We appreciate your cooperation in helping us keep our shared hosting mail platform - and your data - secure.