welcome: please sign in

Revision 5 as of 2007-11-08 05:44:54

Clear message
Edit

MemberManual / Email / VirtualMail

This page describes how to use virtual mailboxes.

TableOfContents

Introduction

Virtual mailboxes are a good way to give someone a "vanity address" on one of your domains, where they can receive and check email. You may create virtual e-mail boxes for any domains for which you have write permission in DomTool.

Before continuing, please note that DomTool allows you to create aliases that forward mail from one address to another. Aliases are much preferable to extra mailboxes, both in terms of conserving server resources and convenience for you, as you can continue checking one mail account even if multiple aliases point to it. The basic rule is: If you are creating a virtual mailbox that only you will read, or if you are creating multiple virtual mailboxes to be read by the same other person, then you should be using aliases instead.

It is also very important that your "daemon" user gets write privileges on the directory that is used to store mail for each vmail username.

Administration

We use a custom program called vmail to manage delivery to virtual mailboxes. It may be invoked with vmail $DOMAIN $COMMAND, which indicates that you are configuring the virtual mailboxes for domain $DOMAIN for which you have DomTool permissions. The valid commands are:

Step-by-step example

Substitute your username for $USER, the username of the virtual mailbox for $VUSER, your domain for $DOMAIN, and the directory to hold their mailbox as $MAILDIR. It is assumed that you have not created the `$MAILDIR' directory yet. If you have, then replace the fs setacl part with fsr setacl.

mkdir -p $MAILDIR
fs setacl $MAILDIR $USER.daemon write
vmail $DOMAIN add $VUSER $MAILDIR
# Enter a password as prompted.
vmail $DOMAIN list
# You will see that the new account shows up.

Access

People with virtual mailboxes may use the normal services for accessing their email, such as SSL IMAP and POP, and the [http://mail2.hcoop.net] web interface. They authenticate giving their full e-mail addresses as usernames, in contrast to the situation for normal UNIX users.

Changing password

People with virtual mailboxes may change their password using the handy web interface at [https://members2.hcoop.net/passwd].