- PlusMail
- Email Redirects
Simple Autoresponders
Simple Mail list
Subscribable Maillists
PlusMail
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.)
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