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With the VMail system you can create any POP account you like. You can also setup your own forwarding aliases, mailing lists, and
easy to use autoresponders.
This is a 'real' virtual mail system. No more accidental overlaps between domains. No more "you can't have that POP account".
The VMail system is meant to look like your own complete UNIX mail system. For 'normal folk' the web interface at
http://yourdomain/sec-bin/vmail provides an easy to use method of adding and deleting POP accounts and forwarding mail.
UNIX folks may choose to directly manipulate their aliases and passwd files.
If you want a "catchall" type of address, you can use "*" (without the quotes), this will catch any mail that would have
otherwise turned into a "no such address" type of message. We refer to this as the wildcard address, and we used to install it by
default.
If you need POP and SMTP servers, set them to yourdomain.
Do you commonly want to send messages to a list of people? Easy. Create a mailing list simply by putting all their addresses into one
file. The name of the file becomes the name of the list. Simply ftp the file into the /yourdomain.vmail/lists/ directory and you're
done :-).
Mail filtering: "|command" is allowed in the alias file. This allows you to install your own mailing list managers (Although usually
we would do this for you) or mail filters (procmail etc... although you have to specify the
full name to the procmail file. e.g. "|procmail /home/yourid/someprocmailfile"
IMAP is supported by our VMail system, any reference above to POP above is applicable to IMAP, since all "mail storage accounts" are
accessable by both POP and IMAP clients, including our supplied install of Squirrel Mail (a popular webmail client) at
http://yourdomain/cgi-bin/sm/
Changing POP Passwords
POP account users can change the password to their VMail POP account by visiting http://yourdomain/cgi-bin/password .
Spoolfile Size Limits
By default, deliveries to spool files bigger than 50 megabytes, or which would make the resulting spoofile bigger than 55 megabytes
will bounce with a "This user is out of disk space" message. That threshold can be adjusted up and down a bit via the /sec-bin/vmail
page.
Autoresponders
Autoresponders are similar to the mailing lists. Put your message into a file. Store that file in the /yourdomain.vmail/responders/
directory under the name that you want it to 'respond' to. Now, if anyone sends a message to that name @yourdomain, the contents of that
file will be sent back to them!
The http://yourdomain/sec-bin/vmail interface has links to add, delete and update autoresponders, so they are even easier to use
than ever before! (New as of Oct 2004. :)
The autoresponders are smart enough to ONLY answer to any given e-mail address once in a 12 hour period, so they should not
be subject to causing mail loops.
You will probably want to specify From: and Subject: lines in your autoresponse text files (and leave a blank line between them and text
of your message). For example, the following file has been stored in /domain.vmail/responders/hats for vmail.baremetal.com:
From: hats@vmail.baremetal.com
Subject: hats
hats now (as compared to shoes),
are something I used to be able
to appreciate...
Go ahead and send a message to hats@vmail.baremetal.com!
Please note:
- There is no .txt suffix on the filename. The example filename is hats ... not hats.txt, not hats.doc, etc...
- If you need to test the autoresponder more frequently than once per 12 hours, you can delete the ".vresponder" file in the
responders directory. This file tracks which addresses have been responded to and when.
- The autoresponder behaves like a normal vmail address. You can forward mail to it... so you could name the file autoresponse and
have "hats" be a forward to autoresponse. (If you are one of those people that wants a .txt filename suffix, you can build a forward to
autoresponse.txt instead.)
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