Mail

We run Exim to handle email and this allows you to easily configure what happens to your email.

The most important thing to note is that there are two parts to mail configuration. The first part is that you have to tell our systems that you want to accept mail for particular local-parts at your domain (a local-part is the part of an email address before the @). The second is to tell our systems what to do with the mail. This second part may involve creating and setting up POP/IMAP mailboxes for it to drop into or telling us where to forward on mail.

The easy way to configure what mail we accept for your domain on tuschin is via Tuschin's control panel which works with hosting and redirect accounts. You just login then choose "Change mail alias configuration". You can also create autoresponders and mailing lists via this interface.

For shell accounts please visit Smokey's control panel or Limo's control panel for the same functionality or you may prefer to use your shell directly according to the instructions below.

POP/IMAP mailboxes

Extra POP/IMAP mailboxes can be created via the admin interface under "Manage POP/IMAP mailboxes".

You may create as many as your disk quota allows. The mailboxes have usernames which look like email addresses however it is important to note that even if you create a mailbox with its username as an email address it still needs to be hooked up via "Change mail setup" or mail to that local-part won't be accepted.

For instance you might host email for your parents and want to create them a mailbox. You might call it parents@surname.me.uk for instance. You would then configure their mail client to use the username parents@surname.me.uk when talking to our servers. Then you have to accept mail. Say your parents are called Anne and Bob. You would set anne@ and bob@ to go to the parents@ mailbox via the "Change mail setup" link adding the local-part anne and pointing it at the parents@ mailbox and then adding the local-part bob and pointing it to the same mailbox.

Note that at this point, you would not be accepting mail to parents@surname.me.uk - only for anne@ and bob@. This is where confusion can arise so we'd urge you to be careful in your mail setup. If you ever want us to look over your setup we're always happy to.

Advanced Setup

Alternatively you can create the files that control Exim yourself, as detailed below. This section requires you to be familiar with editing plain text files and uploading them to our servers. If you don't feel comfortable doing this you need read no further

If you have multiple domains on the same hosting account, you should see the section below ("Multiple domains" to find out the correct .forward file names to use.

At the simplest level you can configure all your email to be forwarded to a single email address by creating a .forward-default file in your home directory containing the address you want your email forwarded to. (Note that your .forward files need to be world readable so that Exim can verify valid email addresses before accepting mail.) Note that creating a default .forward file is not recommended as spammers often make up random local-parts to send mail to such as common first names

For example, if your domain is foobar.co.uk, username foobar and you create a ".forward-default" file containing "me@bar.com" then all mail to foobar.co.uk will be forwarded to me@bar.com.

If instead you'd prefer to forward email to different places depending on whom it's addressed to then you can create a .forward-<local-part> file containing the email address to forward to.

Taking the above example, if we added a ".forward-sales" file containing "alice@rabbithole.com" then any email to sales@foobar.co.uk would be forwarded to alice@rabbithole.com, while all other email to foobar.co.uk would go to me@bar.com.

By removing the .forward-default file you can make us only accept mail for addresses at your domain you have specified with .forward-<user> files.

So, again taking our above example, if we delete the .forward-default file mail to sales@foobar.co.uk will be forwarded to alice@rabbithole.com while all other mail to foobar.co.uk will be bounced with a message saying that the email address doesn't exist. This means that if you have no .forward-<local-part> files and no .forward-default file then no email address at your domain will work.

If you wish to have mail end up in your POP3/IMAP mailbox then instead of putting an email address in the .forward files above you simply create a file containing /home/<username>/Maildir/. You can create more POP/IMAP mailboxes through the web interface mentioned above. If you have configured additional POP3/IMAP mailboxes then you can specify these by putting /home/<username>/popboxes/<popusername>/Maildir/ into the .forward file, with popusername being the username that you use to access the mailbox you wish the mail to go into but with the @ in the username replaced by a %.

Thus, with the above example in mind, if we recreate the .forward-default file but put /home/<username>/Maildir/ in it mail to sales@foobar.co.uk will be forwarded to alice@rabbithole.com while all other mail to foobar.co.uk will end up in foobar's POP3/IMAP mailbox.

Or for Alice's mail if you create a new mailbox with the popusername alice@domainname.co.uk then to forward mail to this box you would place /home/<username>/popboxes/alice%domainname.co.uk/Maildir/ in the appropriate .forward file.

If you want to have all email for <local-part>-anything treated in a particular way you can create a .forward-<local-part>-default which will forward <local-part>-anything in that particular way.

All messages in your POP3/IMAP mailbox (and indeed even those forwarded through Black Cat) contain an "X-BlackCat-To:" header allowing you to tell who the message was actually to at your domain. This is useful if you're using something like fetchmail to pick up mail from your POP3/IMAP mailbox or are forwarding all your email to one address.

The format of the "X-BlackCat-To:" header is <username>-<local-part>@<domain>. For example, an email to sales@foobar.co.uk would be forwarded to alice@rabbithole.com including a header "X-BlackCat-To: foobar-sales@foobar.co.uk".

Multiple domains

If you have multiple domains, the way they are handled depends on whether the domain has a subuser associated with it, and if so, what it is. All domains with the same subuser have the same alias files applied to it.

If the subuser is blank (the default) then the domain's alias configuration will be handled as above. Otherwise, you will need to add the subuser into the filenames. Example: .forward-mysubuser-myalias or .forward-mysubuser-default.

The subuser will initially be set when ordering a domain pointing. You can change it later - see "Manage mail domain subusers" in the control panel described above

Exim filters

We also allow exim filter files to be uploaded as any of your .forward-blah files. Please create a normal Exim filter and then upload it in place of the relevant alias you wish to filter.

The pipe command is restricted and we would urge people not to use it but rather use alternatives in the filter language itself. We do allow fail and defer in user filters.

The filter files should follow the Exim 4 filter specification.

As you cannot run exim -bf to test your filter files on tuschin you have to use the filter file test script from Tuschin's control panel.

If you can't find what you're looking for feel free to contact us