E-mail basics:
With every Netmar account, you have an e-mail address which is <username@netmar.com>.
This e-mail
address may or may not be useful for you. For example, if your website
is budsconcretetruckrental.com, and your username is "bctr",
your Netmar e-mail address would be bctr@netmar.com, which is not very
memorable or descriptive, the way sales@budsconcretetruckrental.com
would be. However, this e-mail address is important, as from time to
time the Netmar staff will send you announcements to this address.
E-mail Forwarding:
Your e-mail address <username@netmar.com> can be forwarded
very easily. In fact, it's done when you sign up for an account, based
on the e-mail address you gave when signing up for your account. The
file that tells our system where to send your mail is in your home directory,
it's called ".forward" (dot-forward). Remember, this
file is hidden. This file is a one-line file, one argument, which
is the e-mail address that all mail sent to your <username@netmar.com>
e-mail address will get forwarded to. If the e-mail address to which
you'd like to receive notices from Netmar is bobsconcrete@aol.com, just
put this e-mail address in that file. If this is the e-mail that you
provided when you signed up, this has already been done for you.
Any changes made to your .forward file will take effect immediately.
E-mail Aliasing:
E-mail aliasing gives you the ability to assign e-mail addresses to
contact points associated with your website. For example, if your website
is mydomain.com, then you can "alias" sales@mydomain.com to
one e-mail address and support@mydomain.com to another. The file that
configures this is your ".aliasmap" file (dot-aliasmap). Formatting
your aliasmap file is very simple: source address : destination address.
If you had, for example, 3 employees (Jon, Susan, Drew), and you needed
5 e-mail addresses for your site, you could set up your aliasmap to
look something like this:
jon@mydomain.com:jon123@aol.com
susan@mydomain.com:suepatterson9@bellatlantic.net
drew@mydomain.com:drew@aaarmistice.com
sales@mydomain.com:drew@aaarmistice.com
support@mydomain.com:suepatterson9@bellatlantic.net
The above would be a perfectly acceptable .aliasmap file. You may duplicate
entries on the right side, but not on the left side. Also,
while it may work, it would be bad form and possibly cause problems
to use an e-mail address from mydomain.com on the right side
of the colon. (i.e. staff@mydomain.com aliased to jon@mydomain.com,
which is in turn aliased to jon123@aol.com).
Changes to your .aliasmap file take effect a maximum of 4 hours after
editing. The files are re-read on a 4 hour schedule automatically.
E-mail Distribution:
Netmar has the capability to set up both distribution lists and majordomo
lists for our clients; however, these functions must be implemented
on a case-by-case basis. A simple distribution would be a small list
of 3 or 4 e-mail addresses that are aliased to one e-mail associated
with your domain, i.e. submissions@my-magazine.com would be sent to
jon123@aol.com, suepatterson9@bellatlantic.net, and drew@aaarmistice.com
all at once. A majordomo list would be a much more complicated list
system, in which people can sign up automatically, admins can oversee
the list, and any one on the list can send messages to be read by other
people on the list.
E-mail staff@netmar.com to ask
about setting one of these up for you.
Vacation Message/Auto-Response
You can also set up a vacation message for your e-mail address. This message will be sent to anyone
who sends a message to your account. To enable the vacation message:
- Login to your shell account
- At the shell prompt, type vacation and press Enter.
- You should see something like the following:
This program can be used to answer your mail automatically when you go away on vacation.
You have a message file in /adm/home/penn/.vacation.msg.
Would you like to see it? n
Would you like to edit it? y
If you answer yes here, the program will allow you to edit the message. You will need to know how to use the vi text editor. In short, vi has two modes of operation: command and insert.
When vi opens, you're in command mode. Type 'i' to enter insert mode. Remember to hit ESC to leave insert mode before you use the arrow keys to move
around. To save and exit the file you're working on, press ESC, then type ':wq' and press Enter.
To enable the vacation feature a ".forward" file is created.
Would you like to enable the vacation feature? y
Vacation feature ENABLED. Please remember to turn it off when you get back from vacation. Bon voyage.
- Be sure to run vacation again when you want to turn it off.
