WORLD WIDE WEB HOSTING

Online Manual

Part Five

PlusMail WEB Control

Email Redirects
Simple Autoresponders
Simple Mail list
Subscribable Maillists

PlusMail

The sophisticated mailing system called PlusMail(tm) 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.

PlusMail Web Control

Email Redirects

There is a file in your home (root) directory called .redirect. This file can be edited and reuploaded. 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 default line is a way to capture all email that comes to your domain no matter what name is used before the @ sign in the address. If the default line is not listed all email will be bounced except for the email that an alias is listed for in the .redirect file.

Below find a example of a default listing, the first redirects all email to your main pop account on the system the second redirects email adressed to your main pop account to another site.

If you want to redirect other names in your domain to other people, you could make the file look like this, as an example:

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, or you can refuse all other email coming in by removing the default line.

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 have a seperate pop account since you can accept all email or only certain aliases by simple entries in the .redirect to your main pop.

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

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 products. We have several items 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 with one address per line

Example list:
add1@email1.com
add2@email2.com
add3@email3.com

You can put up to 1000 names in the list. Once you are done creating the list you goto your home (root) 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 send 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 a 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

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.

4) 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.

5) 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 a few minutes 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.)

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