Administration

Parsing Rules Tab

Purpose

This tab is available to provide flexibility for future enhancements and changes to the internet mail file specifications.

General Use

The parsing rules tab defines what i-Mail uses in the header of a message to determine where a message has come from and where a message is going. You should not generally need to modify this information unless your e-mail system specifically requires it.

Received Line Parsing

In some situations, your ISP may not stamp the header of messages with normal internet formatting which may prevent i-MailDS from extracting e-mail addresses. In this case, you should look at the top line of a message and write a special filter for i-MailDS to obtain the address. If your ISP stamps the header in a different order, or the message is processed my multiple mail servers, you may need to identify which header lines to scan, or a range of header lines.

The sample shown is taken from the following header line:

Received: from smtp.myisp.com [192.168.0.1] by imailds.com with ESMTP for sales@imailds.com id msg123 Mon, 16 Jun 2003 11:00:20 +1200

In this case we are know the e-mail address is between the words 'for' and 'id' and that there is text either side of them. The pattern matches the received line, and we want the result of the second '*', which is obtained by the '%2'.

The patterns and expressions can be used to extract and manipulate most header lines. If the ISP had only stamped the recipient name without the domain, the expression would be '%2@imailds.com'.