• Migrating mail from elsewhere

    Overview When migrating from a previous hosting provider or even consolidating user accounts, it may be necessary to incorporate email from elsewhere into your account. This can be achieved through a variety of ways, from easiest to most cumbersome. Migration techniques SquirrelMail Fetchmail SquirrelMail, a webmail client available within the…

  • Mail forwarded to GMail is delayed

    Overview When creating a forwarded email to deliver mail to third-party providers, such as GMail and Live, mail delivery may appear spotty with some messages never arriving. Cause Certain mail providers use internal heuristics to delay or discard email. Many of these heuristics are trade secrets known only to the…

  • Understanding message failures

    Overview Sometimes an e-mail sent from the server to a recipient will fail. There are a variety of causes and as a “best practice”, the receiving side will report the failure reason for easy understanding. However, it is prudent to note that a reason is not mandatory (just good practice)…

  • Authorizing hostnames to handle e-mail

    Overview A hostname, combination of optional subdomain and mandatory domain, may be configured to act as an e-mail domain, ie. receive e-mails on that host. These hostnames are added via Mail > Mail Routing. For any domain present there, the server will act as the final destination bypassing MX lookups. This…

  • Improving mail filter performance

    Overview E-mail that flows into the server goes through several phases of filtering before final delivery, including: DNSBL lookups on handshake Deep protocol inspection DomainKeys/SPF validation SpamAssassin filtering Whitelist management Hash-sharing systems (DCC & Razor) Token-based regex matching Markup filtering Bayesian filtering All steps in the filtering process are automated, except for…

  • Separating mail to same user, different domain

    Overview Accounts may host multiple domains under one account. In certain circumstances, an e-mail address on one domain must deliver to a different inbox than the same e-mail address on a different domain: info@mydomain.com must not deliver to the same inbox as info@myotherdomain.com Solution Each user within the control panel (Users…

  • Mail filtering

    Overview Message filtering is done prior to delivery via maildrop. Each message goes through two levels of filters: (1) global — processed first in /etc/maildroprc followed by (2) local per-user filters in $HOME/.mailfilter. Basic filtering recipes are provided below. Syntax and usage may be found in mailfilter(7). Important: on older…

  • Unable to send e-mail

    Overview Client is able to receive e-mail, but not send. If client is unable to both send and receive e-mail, then refer to Accessing e-mail for proper login details. Note, this does not affect webmail. Only desktop/handheld mail clients apply. Causes Firewall restriction on port 25 ISPs commonly implement firewall…

  • POP3 vs IMAP e-mail protocols

    Overview POP3 and IMAP are two separate protocols to access e-mail stored on the server. POP3 originated first in 1996 and IMAP in 2003. POP3 is designed for devices that have limited Internet connectivity and limited storage available on the mail server. POP3 is suitable for a dial-up connection or situations in…

  • Accessing Spam folder

    Overview Your “Spam” folder is an e-mail folder on all e-mail accounts that quarantines e-mails that have an above-average probability of being spam, but are not clearly spam. In SpamAssassin scoring terms, these are messages that score between 5 and 10. Accessing the Spam folder There are 2 ways to access…