: Email Alias Editor

Virtual Hosting Clients have full control over their email aliases and autoresponders using the Alias Editor. With this you may edit your existing aliases and add new ones. Before using the editor, please take a minute to familiarize yourself with the way the email aliases work by reading the tutorial below.

Make sure you are on the same server as your web site:

[Run the Email Alias Editor]

Email Alias Tutorial

Other sections

• Setting your Default Alias to Multiple Addresses
• Step-by-step instructions for creating a Simple Mail List
• Special Autoresponder that saves email addresses to a file

While you have a POP email box on Speedsoft which you can connect to for sending and receiving email with an email program, all email activity for virtual hosting clients are conducted through email aliases. These aliases can be anything you want, consisting of alphanumerics, dashes, periods and underlines.

You can make up any email name you want to for your domain name and it will work. You don't have to enter it into the Alias Editor. The reason is that you have an email default for your domain name. Any email sent to your domain name will be sent to this default address if it is not found as an alias. (To read about setting your default to send to multiple email addresses, see the bottom of this page.)

Email aliases can be directed in one of four ways to what we call your "Points To" addresses:

• To your POP email account:

  Set your "Points To" address to your username. (do not include your domain name)
  Example: bob

• To another email address:

  Set your "Points To" address to the email address you want the email to be forwarded to.
  Example: bob342@aol.com

• To an autoresponder:

  You must provide a "From" email address where people can send replies to and a "Filename" of the file to automatically return to the sender.

•  

  To a mail list:

  You must provide a valid text file name containing a list of email addresses. For instance if you want email to be sent to four email addresses, your plain text mail list file might look like this:

  bobby@isp.com
  fran@isp.com
  lulu@microsoft.com
  tommy@seatle.org

  For detailed instructions see Step-by-step instructions for creating a Simple Mail List.

Speedsoft Reseller Note: You cannot have an email alias Points-To entry set to send email to another email alias on your domain name. For instance, if your domain name was widget.com, you could not define an alias to point to myfriend@widget.com. Furthermore, you cannot define an alias to point to a domain name that is hosted on the same server as yours.

A sample email alias form from the Alias Editor:

This alias would forward any email sent to sally@widget.com to the user "bob" POP mail account on the Speedsoft server, and send a copy to "sally2@aol.com". It would also send a reply back to the sender with the contents of the "confirm.txt" file located in the user's "/autoresponders" directory. It would also send a copy of it to every email address located in the "mailist.txt" file located in the "lists" subdirectory.

Setting your Default Alias to Multiple Addresses

This is a bit tricky, but clients have asked for it so here goes. Let's say you want to have your default alias set to send email to two or more addresses. There is no straight-forward way to do this using the Email Alias Editor. However, here is a perfectly legitimate workaround. For example, let's say we want to set our default alias to send email to sally@isp.com and judy@ralph.edu, your domain name is widget.com and your username is bob. Here is how we would do it: Set the default alias to <username>-default, where <username> is bob for this example, and then create an alias for default and set that alias to point to the email addresses you want.

Mail List Step-By-Step Instructions

To create a "Simple Mail List" for use with an Email Alias:

For this example we will assume you want to create a list of email addresses which when you send an email to my-list@widget.com, the email will automatically be forwarded to all email addresses on your list.

1) Create a text file using your favorite word processor or Windows Notepad.  Name it something like "my-list.txt".  The text file should contain the list of email addresses you want to send your email to.  The email addresses should be listed one address per line, with no punctuation like parenthesis or quotation marks around the addresses.

2) Upload this file using FTP in ASCII mode to your web site on Speedsoft. You can use MS FrontPage for this, also.  You can upload it to your root directory or a subdirectory.  We suggest you create a subdirectory called "lists" and place it in there.  This is just to help organize things for your own benefit.

3) Using the Email Alias Editor, create an email alias that will utilize this "my-list.txt" file.  To do this:

a) Login to the Email Alias Editor and go the "Add" section.

b) Check the "Add" box to the left of the Email Alias you will be adding.

c) In the "Alias Name" box, type "my-list".

d) In the "Points To" section on the right, leave the "Individual Addresses" and "Autoresponder" boxes blank.

e) In the "Mail List, File" box type the name of your mail list file, "my-list.txt".  If you uploaded the "my-list.txt" file to a subdirectory named "lists", you would type "lists/my-list.txt".

4) Click on the "Save Changes" button on the Email Alias Editor and wait for it to complete.

5) You are now ready to send email to "my-list@widget.com" and have the email forwarded to all addresses contained in the "my-list.txt" file.

Special Autoresponder Program

|/usr/bin/ar.pl <return_email_address> <autoresponder_file> <email_address_data_file>

for example: 

|/usr/bin/ar.pl bob@widget.com /usr/local/etc/httpd/vhosts/widget/testar.txt 
/usr/local/etc/httpd/vhosts/widget/email_info.dat

Then when someone emails the alias you have this defined for, they will get the autoresponder that is at /usr/local/etc/httpd/vhosts/widget/testar.txt , and their email address will be added as a line in the /usr/local/etc/httpd/vhosts/widget/email_info.dat file.