Mailbox and Redirection FAQ
What is a Mailbox?
A "mailbox" is simply a place that stores email messages. Its
nearest equivalent in the non-electronic world would be a post
office box at your local post office, or even your own letter
box. In the post office analogy, each mailbox is unique, having
its own number and a key to access it. Similarly, each email mailbox
on our server has its own unique login name and password.
Your address at a post office is POboxNumber@some-post-office.
When you have a mailbox on Host 1, your post office is "host1.com.au",
so your address would be loginname@host1.com.au. For this reason,
your login or mailbox name for each mailbox must be unique on
our system. You cannot have names like "sales" or "support" because
these have already been taken.
When your domain name is hosted on our server, you can replace
"host1.com.au" with "yourdomain.com.au", however the login name
is still required to be unique.
What is a Redirection?
A redirection is an "action" that delivers email to another address.
A redirection can be told to deliver mail to a certain mailbox,
but it is not a mailbox. Consider someone moving house
and asking the post office to deliver their mail to another address.
In this situation, the person's new address would be their mailbox,
and their old address can be a redirection, in that mail sent
to that old address can be delivered to the new one.
Redirections must be used in conjunction with hosted
domain names. A redirection means you can have an address my-redirection@yourcompany.com.au
where you have specified that "my-redirection" should be a redirection
for your mailbox name.
Specific Redirections: Say if your account login name
is "companyxyz", then you will have a "mailbox" with an address
of companyxyz@host1.com.au. Remember you can replace "host1.com.au"
with your own domain name, so this would be the same as companyxyz@yourcompany.com.au.
You can have redirections of "info@yourcompany.com.au" or "manager@yourcompany.com.au"
pointing to your companyxyz mailbox.
Default Redirection: This is an "anything else" redirection.
It means that "anything-at-all"@yourcompany.com.au will be delivered
to your mailbox, except for any specific redirections that have
been setup.
Combining mailboxes with redirections to deliver email effectively
If there is only one person checking email for your company then
there may be little point in setting up a separate mailbox for your
accounts/sales/support email. Remember that each mailbox on our
server has its own username and password, so you will need to setup
an email client such as eudora or netscape mail for each of these
mailboxes. Instead you can set your default redirection to point
to your main mailbox, advertise several addresses, and then filter
the mail as you receive it in your mail client based on who it was
sent "To:".
If there is more than one person checking mail then it would be
logical to have a mailbox for each of them. Obviously you cannot
have a mailbox named "support", because we at Host 1 already have
this. You can, however, have a mailbox named "xyz-support". You
then could have an redirection called "support@yourcompany.com.au"
pointing to the "xyz-support" mailbox. So your customers can send
email to "support@yourcompany.com.au" and it will be delivered to
the xyz-support mailbox on our servers where you pick it up.
Your mailbox and redirection names can be the same, if the mailbox
username is unique. Remember also, that if you have a "default"
redirection set for your domain, then each mailbox has to have a
corresponding redirection to make sure the email is delivered to
the desired mailbox, and not the default company mailbox! |
