The sophisticated mailing system called
PlusMail is included as part of your service. In addition to being able
to have nearly unlimited infobots by simply adding text files to a directory,
you can also redirect mail for everyone in your domain by simply modifying
a text file.
.
Email
Redirects
There is a file in your home (root)
directory called .redirect. This file can be edited and re-uploaded. Just
make sure that each of your redirects is on its own line, with a space
between the name and where you want it directed to. Don't add empty lines
between entries, and make sure the file is saved in text (ASCII) format,
and uploaded in text (not binary) format. When you download it to your
hard drive, you will see that it already has a one-line entry that looks
like this:
default yourdomain@yourdomain.com
This line must be left as is, otherwise
your POP email accounts could get messed up. But suppose you want all email
for your domain to go to your already existing POP account somewhere else.
You would then change your .redirect file to look like this:
default yourdomain@yourdomain.com
yourdomain existingaddress@somewhereelse.com
If you want to redirect other names
in your domain to other people, you could make the file look like this,
as an example:
default yourdomain@yourdomain.com
fred 73452.452@compuserve.com
info goddess@afterlife.com
This would redirect mail for fred@yourdomain.com
to 73452.452@compuserve.com, info@yourdomain.com to goddess@afterlife.com,
and all other email in your domain would go to yourdomain@yourdomain.com.
The benefit of PlusMail redirects
is that you don't need a separate POP account for each email address you
want to use in your domain. You can put in your webpages, "Send email to
help@yourdomain.com" without the need to create a separate entry in the
.redirect file because ALL email goes by default to yourdomain@yourdomain.com,
unless "help" is specified to go somewhere else!
Multiple redirection is possible.
For instance if you want email to go to two addresses at the same time,
enter the different emails with a comma to separate them, no spaces. For
example:
help beavis@aol.com,butthead@prodigy.net
Note: You may only forward upto a
max of 4 email addresses in the .redirect and they must be listed on a
single line. If more than 4 forwarding addresses are needed use the maillists
directory.
Email redirects can be used in conjunction
with autoresponders to return an error message to people sending emails
to invalid email addresses on your domain. This autoresponder could send
back an error message like "Oops, you reached an invalid address, please
try again." See "Simple Autoresponders" below for how to implement this.
.
Simple
Autoresponders
An autoresponder is a simple way of
setting up an email address which will return a message automatically when
someone sends email to it. Here are the instructions for setting this up.
In your root (home) directory, there
is a directory called infobots. Set up a welcome message in this directory
-- you can name it anything you like, but for our example we'll call it
info. Don't call it info.txt -- just name it plain info with no file extension.
The text for the welcome message could say:
"Thank you for requesting more information
about our webpage design package. We have several design packages to choose
from. Here are our prices..."
Now, whenever someone sends email
to: info@yourdomain.com they will automatically receive that text email
message to whatever email address they specified as their return-to address.
It's as simple as that.
How do I see who is using my infobots?
Assume your infobot address is info@example.com.
Just put the following line in your
.redirect file.
.
info example@example.com
The original email message will
be sent to example@example.com, and the
original sender will get the infobot
text.
.
Important Note: Please be
sure to put the text file in the infobot directory before putting it in
your .redirect or the infobot will not work.
You can have as many autoresponders
as you want. Just save them all in the infobots directory and give them
each a unique name of anything with between 3-16 characters long.
.
Maillists
To make a Plusmail list create a simple
text file one address per line
Example list
.
add1@email1.com
add2@email2.com
add3@email3.com
.
You can put upto 1000 names in the
list. Once you are done creating the list you goto your home directory
and put the list in the subdirectory maillists. The list may be named anything
you like, its important theres no extension on the end.
Example:
clients (good name) clients.txt
(no good)
To use the list you just need to
mail to the name of the list. using the above example with a domain name
of fred.com, to email the list you would send to clients@fred.com. its
that simple, note if your maillist is named clients it cannot be used in
the infobots directory or the .redirect file.
.
Subscribable
Maillists
PlusMail can be setup so your customers
can subscribe to your list via email. There is a limit of 1,000 subscribers
per list and you cannot send email to the list larger than 75k. Here are
the instructions for setting up this list:
1) Set up a welcome message in the
infobot directory -- you can name it anything you like, but for our example
we'll call it welcome.
The text file could say:
"Welcome to our Maillist. You are
now subscribed to our list.
This message will be automatically
returned to the sender each time someone subscribes.
2) Now you need to set up a configuration
file to tell the mail system to build a mailing list. In your infobot directory
create a file called infolist. This is used to tell the system what to
do with addresses received from each infobot response. You can have as
many lists as you want. But in keeping with the list example above, we
will call it mlist.
Here's what the file should look
like:
welcome mlist
The first line should have a space
between the two names and be uploaded in text format, not binary.
You can have multiple lists, such
as mlist1, mlist2, etc., but you should only have one configuration file.
It must be called infolist. To handle all three examples, you'd make the
infolist file look like this, with each listserver on its own line, with
no blank lines in-between:
welcome mlist
welcome2 mlist2
welcome3 mlist3
2A) Now when someone wants to subscribe
to your list in the above example, they would email welcome@yourdomain.com.
This would return the infobot created called "welcome" and put their email
address into the mailing list file in the maillists directory on your server.
You can go in and download the maillist file after it has been created
and people have subscribed. The mailing list file will be created AFTER
the first person subscribes, or if you yourself send email to "welcome@yourdomain.com"
to test it. Put yourself on the mailing list to try this. People don't
need to subscribe themselves -- you can add their names for them, or remove
them at any time by modifying and uploading the file in the "maillists"
directory. People cannot automatically unsubscribe themselves. You must
go in and manually remove their email address from the list.
3) Now when you want to send mail
to all subscribers, you can send email to mlist@yourdomain.com and the
PlusMail system will send it to the entire list.
(To password protect the file, add
a password to the first line of your maillists file. In order to mail to
the list, this password must be in the first line in the body of the message.
Anybody that sends to the list without the password will have their message
sent to the default address in the .redirect file. You can then decide
if you want them to mail to the list and give them the password if you
desire).
4) If you want to see who is subscribing
to your maillist without having to go and check the maillists file periodically
via FTP, you can put a line in your .redirect file. NOTE: it is important
that you have the infobot installed before entering the address line in
the .redirect. For the mlist example we used above, the line you would
add would look like this:
welcome yourdomain@yourdomain.com
The welcome document you created
will be sent to the subscriber, AND you will receive their email message.
Note: When sending email to your
list for the first time, you will get the autoresponder email back right
away, but you may not see the corresponding maillist file right away, as
our system takes time to build it. Wait 15 or 30 minutes or so and it will
show up. (Depending on the time of day and current traffic conditions,
our servers may be allocating it to a lower priority.) |
