This page deals primarily with Premium accounts. Starter accounts forward all email to your existing email address, so you don't
have to configure anything. Baby accounts share email with the Premium account that they were registered under. Some baby accounts
have been specially set up to forward all email like a starter account. Only premium account users can log into the
Mail Administration system.
Understanding pop accounts, forwarders and aliases
When you get into Mail Administration, logged in as postmaster, you will see a list of the different types of
email accounts that you can set up. It is important to understand what these different types are.
Pop Accounts
These are normal mailboxes. When a message is sent to one of these accounts, it is stored on a mail server at Zymurgy, and not at your ISP.
You might want to use this sort of mail box if you need additional mailboxes from what your ISP supports, or if your ISP limits the size of
messages. Another advantage to this type of email address is that you can use the Mail
Login feature to read your email from a web browser when you are away from the computer you normally use.
Aliases
These are aliases to pop accounts. Lets say for example that you want to use your name for your email address, but you also want to get
email for sales@mydomain.com. You would set up an alias called sales to direct that mail to your real account. Another possibility
is that you have a number of sales people working with you, and you rotate general inquiries between them each week. You could simply change
the sales alias to point to a different sales rep each week.
Forwarders
These are like aliases but to outside accounts. These are typically used to forward email to the email address given to you by
your ISP. Since you connect directly to your ISP for email, performance may be a little bit better from their servers, although sometimes
their mail servers are so over-loaded that it is faster using ours. Another advantage to using forwarders is that you don't need to
reconfigure your email software.
The Fancy Stuff... Autoresponders and Mailing Lists
Autoresponders will reply to any message sent to them with a predetermined fixed message. You might have had a change in staffing
for example, and you wish to let people know when they email the old employee's address who they should be contacting. You might
even want to have an info@mydomain.com address that always responds with generic information.
Mailing lists are for group discussion in email. They are not intended for mass marketing mailings or spam! When anyone emails
the mailing list's address, that message will go out to all the members of the list. If any of them reply to a message, that reply
will go to all members of the list (unless the specifically choose to send the reply only to the sender). You might want to use
a mailing list for all of your staff to send out public notices, or you might want to set up groups of clients in mailing lists
to discuss certain issues. You might even want to set up a mailing list for your old high school buddies to keep in touch.
Configuring your Email Software
You should always try to use your own ISP's SMTP server instead of ours.
More and more ISP's are blocking access to any but their own SMTP servers.
You should be able to use the SMTP server information that you would use
if you were setting up the email provided by your ISP.
To configure your email software you'll need to know the following information:
Mail (SMTP) Server:
Your ISP's mail server, or mail.zymsys.com if that doesn't work.
POP/IMAP Server:
mail.zymsys.com
POP/IMAP User ID:
userid_mydomain.com
Note on using IMAP: IMAP support should be considered only beta quality. IMAP is very useful for users who
wish to coordinate their mailbox between more than one computer. We are running the Courier IMAP server software,
and have found compatibility problems with the clients we have tested. If you don't need to coordinate your mailbox
across computers, POP is probably the better choice for now.
Note on POP/IMAP User ID's: Your POP User ID is your email address with the @ sign changed to an underscore. For
example, if your email address was userid@mydomain.com then your POP/IMAP user ID would be
userid_mydomain.com.
More help can be found on configuring your email software from the software vendor. Here are some quick links to help
for:
