Default Mail Handler

If your email users are located in one single location, for instance in the office or school, you can use the default mail handler feature of our email system. Using default mail handler together with a local mail server will make your email system more efficient.

Note

Default mail handler is also known as DomainPOP or catchall email address.

The default mail handler is given to each created subdomain that can receive email. With default mail handler, any email that get sent to an undefined address in the respective domain (or subdomain) will be saved in the default mailbox that is located on our server. Then your own email server in turn can download the whole mailbox and distribute the email to a local mailbox on your email server* This way, your users don't need to connect directly to our mail server, thus saving your time and bandwidth.

This will explained better in example.

  1. You create a mail server using MDaemon on your facility.

  2. You add three users to your mail server: joe@uk.example.com, john@uk.example.com and jane@uk.example.com. You configure your mail server to deliver email to these users locally and assign them password for your users to access their mailbox on your mail server.

  3. You create subdomain uk.example.com on our server and configure it to use default mail handler. You don't create the individual mailbox on our server, otherwise their email won't get sent to the default mail handler.

  4. You configure your own mail server to download email from the default mail account default@uk.example.com periodically. Your mail server then will sort the incoming emails and distribute them to your users, while bouncing any emails with unknown destinations.

  5. Your users in turn will be able to download their own email from your mail server inside your facility.

The default mail handler will handle all emails that the address has not been defined by you. In example above, if your add john@uk.example.com on our mail server, the email will get sent to a mailbox on our server, not the default mail handler. Additionally, this is where the email bouncer accounts come in handy. For example, whenever john@uk.example.com resigns from your company, you can assign a mail bouncer on our server, so any email that get sent to john will bounced at our mail server, and you don't need to download john's email again, saving you some bandwidth.

Warning

Lots of spammers employ spamming technique known as 'dictionary attack'. They don't harvest email addresses, but they simply guess email addresses of a known domain. If you are using default mail handler and a spammer tries to 'dictionary' your domain, then you will get a lot of mails to nonexistant users.

Editing Default Mail Handler

To edit the default mail handler, please do the following.

  1. Log on to SiteManager if you haven't already logged on.

  2. Go to Email menu. On the default mail handler section, click edit on the right of subdomain you want to edit its default mail handler.

  3. On the next screen you can change the default action. You can change it to return to sender as undeliverable (default), deliver to POP/IMAP account, or forward to another email address.

  4. If you choose to forward to another email address, you need to specify mail forwarding destination.

  5. If you choose to deliver to POP/IMAP account, you need to specify the password that can be used to download incoming email using POP or IMAP.

  6. Click Update Default Mail Handler to finalize your changes.

To download email messages and distribute them to your local user, you will need to use an email client software that understand how to manage multiple email accounts in a single POP/IMAP mailbox. This software probably must also act as a POP/IMAP server itself to be able to distribute mail to your local users. Examples of such clients are MDaemon or Fetchmail.

Important

You must tell your default mail handler client to filter incoming email messages using 'X-Rcpt-To' or 'X-POP3-Rcpt' headers. Please refer to the client software's manual for more information on how to do this.

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