How Email Accounts, Aliases, and Forward Work

Introduction

The iMagine IS email setup is somewhat more complicated than, and more powerful than, the typical email setup that most folks are likely used to. Please use this document as a guide to help you generate requests for new accounts, aliases, and email forwards.

Most hosting providers offer you a given number of POP3 email accounts. The setup is relatively simple, in that your email account username is essentially whatever you want it to be, as is your password. This setup is limited, however, because it forces the provider to use either special software or to dedicated an IP address to every single customer. Both of these situations are problematic either for the hosting provider or for the Internet as a whole because of the severe shortage of IP addresses which currently exists.

Additionally, the above scenarios typically prevent providers from offering IMAP email support. Even if they do provide support for IMAP email, it is often a separate service from their standard POP3 email accounts.

Our solution to email, we believe, fixes all of the above problems. It does introduce some added complexity, though, because setting up an email address and setting up an email account are separate tasks. The benefits are that the customer gets a fully functional POP3 account, IMAP4 account, and any number of aliases associated with that account. And further, email forwards do not use up any of your email accounts that come with your service!

Step 1: Create an Email Account

An email account takes the form of username@yourserver.imagineis.com. That is to say, if your server name is std12.imagineis.com, and your email account username is johnmail, your base email address will be “johnmail@std12.imagineis.com”. You could, if you wanted to, give this address out and it would work as-is.

The yourserver.imagineis.com part will always be the same, since all of your email will always be hosted on the same server your Web site is. The username part, though, will be different for each individual email account you want. The rules for the username are the same as for our standard UNIX accounts; they must be 5-8 lowercase letters. And, they have to be unique! A username like support will almost certainly be taken already, so be sure to request something unusual like johnsupp.

Step 2: Adding Email Aliases

Your new email address is not limited to the cryptic username above, nor is it limited to being associated with our domain name. In the above example, let’s say your domain name is johnsfamily.net. Your base email address that was just setup may be johnmail@std12.imagineis.com, but you can have any address at your own domain name point this address. For example, if you want the much nicer email address john@johnsfamily.net, what we will do is create that as an alias to your base account. You can have infinite email aliases pointing to your base email account. Furthermore, you can mix and match, too!

Let’s say you have a second domain name, johnsite.com. You can have both john@johnsfamily.net and johnny@johnsite.com pointing to your base email account, johnmail@std12.imagineis.com. Finally, if you also had the account johnsupp@std12.imagineis.com, you could also have the aliases support@johnsfamily.net and support@johnsite.com both pointing to the base email account.

Step 3: Email Forwards

Setting up an email forward is very simple. A forward is not associated with a base email account. It is completely independent. You simply need to give us the base address (say, maria@johnsfamily.net) and the destination email address (say, mariajohn@yahoo.com).

Step 4: Catch-all’s

A catch-all is an email configuration which will work for any email address that wasn’t otherwise configured. Using the above example, you could have a catch-all setup to send any email to any address at your domains not otherwise configure to go to a special account. If you created a special account for this, say, johnspam, you could have a catch-all setup for the above two domain names. So if someone sent an email to sales@johnsfamily.net, even though this address wasn’t setup as either or a forward, it will go to the johnspam@std12.imagineis.com account.

You can even have a catch-all work just like an email forward. In this case it would send any email sent to addresses not configured to a remote email account.

Conclusion

With the above information, you should be able to formulate work orders for us to process simply and easily. There’s a dual benefit to well formatted email requests: First, it’s easier for us to set them up when all of the information we need is available to us. Secondly, and more importantly, you get your email requests handled and completed quickly without any back-and-forth with us while we try to get the information we need to handle your requests!