Email Tutorial

The most common question we get boils down to "how to I configure email with my domain?" This document will explain everything you should need to know.

Your Main Mailbox

The first thing you need to understand is that as soon as you create an account on islandhosting.com you have a working email or POP box. The name of the mailbox is your username. So if your username is "janesmith" then your main mailbox is also "janesmith".

Email can get into your main mailbox via two routes. Any email that gets sent to "[email protected]" will go there, and if you have your own domain name, all email for that domain will go there by default as well.

When I say "all email for that domain" I mean any email at all that ends with "@yourdomain.com". The part to the left of the "@" sign is meaningless. If someone sends email to "[email protected]", or to "[email protected]", or to anything else at yourdomain.com it all winds up in your main mailbox.

To download email from your main mailbox you simply use any POP mail client (like Eudora or Outlook Express) and configure it to connect to use "islandhosting.com" as the POP server, and use your account username and password.

Additional Mailboxes

An extra mailbox (or POP box) is like a secondary account. It has its own username and password. Email that is delivered into an extra mailbox is stored separately and is not downloaded via your main mailbox. They are mainly used when you want other people in your organization to have their own private mailbox.

You create extra mailboxes via our Control Panel. When you create a mailbox you get to pick a 1 to 5 character "POP ID" and a password. It's important to note that the POP ID forms only part of the username that will be used to download email from that mailbox.

The full username for an extra mailbox consists of your main username plus a hyphen plus the POP ID. So if your username is "janesmith" and you create an extra mailbox with a POP ID of "sales", the username for that mailbox will be "janesmith-sales" and that's what you'd use in your mail software when downloading mail from the server.

At this point you could send email to "[email protected]" and it would work, but you probably want to use something like "[email protected]" instead.

Map Files

Remember that by default all email messages destined for your domain will go into your main mailbox. So how do you get email for "[email protected]" to go into the "janesmith-sales" mailbox? You must create a "map file".

A map file is a plain text file that you place in your root directory (that's the place in your account where you'll see the "www" subdirectory). The name of the map file must begin with "map." and end with your domain (eg: map.yourdomain.com).

Lines in the map file look something like this (note that blank lines or lines that begin with a '#' symbol are ignored):

   sales:janesmith-sales
   webmaster:[email protected]
   frank:!Frank's new email address is [email protected]

note: there must not be any spaces before or after the colon

When a new email arrives for your domain, the system takes the part to the left of the '@' symbol and compares it against each line in your map file. So if mail arrives for "[email protected]", it will scan the map file looking for a match for "sales".

If it finds a matching line in the map file, the email is processed according to the information that appears to the right of the ':' (colon) symbol. In the example above it's simple "janesmith-sales" which means "deliver the email into the janesmith-sales mailbox".

If an incoming message does not match any lines in the map file then the default action is to deliver the message into your main mailbox, just as if there were no map file at all.

So you could, for example, direct "sales", "info", "marketing", and "orders" all into "janesmith-sales" by adding a line to your map file for each one of them.

Now you can use the "[email protected]" address, and email for it will go into the "janesmith-sales" mailbox.

Note that you should specify a mailbox just by its full username (eg: janesmith-sales). Do not try to forward email to "sales", or to "[email protected]", etc.

More Map File Features

Map files can do more than simply direct incoming mail into a particular mailbox. You can cause certain email addresses at your domain to be forwarded offsite to someone else completely. For example:

   webmaster:[email protected]
In this example, any email arriving for "[email protected]" would be forwarded out to "[email protected]". The difference here is that instead of a mailbox we've specified a full email address.

There may be times when you want certain email addresses to generate an error response (a "bounce" message). For example:

   frank:!Frank's new email address is [email protected]
That leading '!' symbol tells the system to generate an error reply. The text following the '!' symbol is optional and is included in the error message. If you don't specify an error message the default is "No such user."

You can also turn email addresses into a "black hole". This means that any messages arriving for this address should be silently deleted. You do this with the '@' symbol, like this:

   nobody:@
Finally, you can use the '*' wildcard character, like this:

   *master:janesmith-admin
   web*:[email protected]
   *:janesmith
In that example, any incoming mail for "webguy", "webby", etc. would be forwarded to "[email protected]" while any email for "postmaster" or "webmaster" would go into the "janesmith-admin" mailbox (note that even though "webmaster" matches the second rule, it matches the one before it first so that's the one that is used).

The third line in the example above matches all remaining messages and simply delivers them into the main mailbox. Since that is the default action anyway, that line is really redundant. However you might want to explicitly allow certain email addresses in earlier lines then end the map file with something like this:

   *:!
which would cause all other unrecognised addresses to bounce.

Multiple Domains

If you have more than one domain simply create a separate map file for each domain.

It's important to note that a map file for "yourdomain1.com" will not be consulted when email arrives for "yourdomain2.com". However two different map files can certainly direct email to the same mailboxes if you want.

PEP

When a message is actually delivered into an islandhosting.com mailbox, be it your main mailbox or one of your extra mailboxes, it is done via a program called PEP.

PEP allows you to perform various tests on the headers and body of incoming messages and perform actions like deleting messages, forwarding them, sending them to a fax machine, sending them to a pager, sending an automatic reply, and more.

PEP is a very powerful tool, especially for things like filtering out junk email (aka "spam").

Instructions for PEP can be found at http://www.islandnet.com/pep.html.

To use PEP you need to create a "mailrule" file containing your rules. For your main mailbox this file goes in your root directory, the same place your map file goes. You can have a separate mailrule file for each extra mailbox too. These go into the "pop/janesmith-sales" (for example) directory which you should see in your account.


Copyright 2002 by islandhosting.com Site design by Islandnet.com