Administration

Domains Tab

Hosted domains in i-Mail ADS

Purpose

Host and remote domains are the identities by which your company is known on the internet. This tab configures i-Mail to accept mail for your domain and to ignore messages that have arrived for other domains. The domains you specify may be registered or ones you have made up yourself for internal mail use. Beware that unregistered domains will have trouble when you start sending mail to the internet, because the messages may have not route back to the sender.

Hosted Domains

Hosted domains are the names of the domain that your i-Mail system is known by. You may host multiple domains on your site. These domains configure the i-Mail local users which connect directly via popular e-mail clients.

For mail that is not for a user that has been named in the Accounts tab, you can specify the action to be taken. If you want to discard the messages, select the ‘Discard mail’ check box. If you want the mail forwarded to the global PostMaster, select the ‘Forward to PostMaster’ checkbox. Additionally in i-Mail ADS you can specify a user in an independent domain to receive misdirected mail for that domain.

ADS Functionality

Independent domains give you the ability to separate your system into distinct mail systems which allow identical names at different e-mail addresses, i.e. john@companya.com and john@businessb.com.
The Access Prefix and NDS context are used only with independant domains. All independant domains must have an access prefix. This provides clients a mail login which determines which domain they are retrieving mail from. For instance, companya.com might have an access prefix of compa, thus john would set up his mail client to retrieve mail from the mailbox 'compa/john'.

More details on how to divide domains can be found in the document 'Dividing Domains'.

Remote Domains

Remote domains configure i-Mail to forward messages to another e-mail system using the SMTP protocol. Messages that have recipient names for the named domains will be forwarded to the specified host.

Use the local lookup option to control mail forwarding to your remote system. In some e-mail systems, mail that is sent to an unknown recipient is either discarded or returned to sender. Using i-Mail you can prevent this function by forwarding the mail to the PostMaster.

The local lookup function must be used with the 10 and 50 user versions of i-Mail for mail forwarding.

You may additionally change the port that i-Mail will send on, to any named remote SMTP server. This will override the default SMTP sending port set in the TCP Ports/Connections tab.

Concepts

Use remote domains to configure i-Mail as a gateway to a remote i-Mail system or a foreign mail system such as GroupWise. This feature is also used for creating multiple site mail systems and routing mechanisms e.g. A network with 5 sites connected end to end via dial up links may use i-Mail to collect internet mail from a single internet connection at site 1 and forward remote messages through a number of hops to their final destination.

If you do not own a domain name on the internet you may still set up your internal mail system with a domain name. To send internet mail, users should be configured with a reply address that is your actual internet mail account. This facilitates a multi-user internal mail system with a single external mail box. Inbound mail would be directed to a single account to be distributed manually.

Tips

Do not set the domain name up as your Internet Service Provider name. This will cause all downloaded mail that has been sent to your address and also to other users who have accounts at the ISP to be included in the local domain. In this situation, all unknown users will be forwarded to the PostMaster. A sensible way to configure your i-Mail system is to set up your own ‘fake’ domain and use the Recipient Replacement tab to rename your local address.

For example:

Robert works at acme and has a single personal account at his isp. His e-mail address is ‘robert@isp.com’.

A person sends a mail message to ‘bob@company1.com’, fred@company2.com , ‘sally@isp.com’ and ‘robert@isp.com’.

On an i-Mail system configured to receive mail with a domain of isp.com, this message would be read as receiving mail for Sally and Robert even though Robert is the only intended mail recipient. To avoid duplicate mail, the local domain should be acme.com and a recipient replacement rule needs to be configured to change the name ‘robert@isp.com’ to ‘robert@acme.com’.

Note that Robert should still have his e-mail address or Reply-To address in his mail client package set to ‘robert@isp.com’ so that return mail will still be sent to the correct host on the internet.