PlusMail Control Panel

Email Redirects
Simple Autoresponders
Simple Mail list
Subscribable Maillists

The sophisticated mailing system called PlusMail^tm is included as part of your service. In addition to being able to have nearly unlimited infobots (autoresponders) by simply adding text files to a directory, you can also redirect mail for everyone in your domain by simply modifying a text file or using the "Control Panel".

Plusmail has a advanced web "Control Panel" which allows you the ability to control all aspects of your web presence from a web browser. To access your "Control Panel" use the following link:

http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/plusmail

NOTE: Due to the unique security requirement of the administration system, you must have your browser set to allow cookies. This, in conjunction with a number of hidden verification systems, assures that you are the only user allowed to access these features on your domain.

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Do NOT use the "Edit Website" option within the "Control Panel" if you use FrontPage to publish your website to the server. You will corrupt the FrontPage extensions and your website. This feature is meant for non-FrontPage users.

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This feature can be controlled by the Control Panel. There is a file in your home (root) directory called .redirect. This file can be edited and uploaded again. 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, you will find a example of a default listing: the first redirects all email to your main POP3 on the system and the second redirects email addressed to your main domain to an off-site POP3.

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 similar to this:

default yourdomain@yourdomain.com
fred f.dobbs@compuserve.com
info shirleyjones@aol.com

This would redirect mail for:
fred@yourdomain.com to f.dobbs@compuserve.com
info@yourdomain.com to shirleyjones@aol.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 POP3 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 separate POP3 account since you can accept any and all email or only certain aliases by simple entries in the .redirect to your main POP3.

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. As an example:

help tweety@aol.com,sylvester@prodigy.net

This would redirect mail for help@yourdomain.com to
tweety@aol.com and sylvester@prodigy.net

Note: You can only forward up to a maximum of 4 email addresses in the .redirect. They must be listed on a single line. If more than 4 forwarding addresses are needed, use the maillists directory.

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This feature can be controlled by the Control Panel. 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.

If you want to see who is using your infobots, assume your infobot address is info@example.com and just put the following line in your .redirect fil:

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: 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 between 3-16 characters long.

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This feature can be controlled by the Control Panel. 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 up to 1000 names on the list. Once you are finished creating the list, go to your home directory and put the list in the subdirectory maillists. The list may be named anything you like, but it's important that there is 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. Note: if your maillist is named clients, it cannot be used in the infobots directory or the .redirect file.

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This feature can be controlled by the Control Panel. 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.

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 might 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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