A mail alias is not an account.
A mail alias can help two users share a computer.
You can create your own mail alias.
Mail aliases inside your private domain.
- VNI's defaults for your domain.
- An example of domain aliases.
- An example blocking unspecifed names.
- Blocking all mail.
What is a mail alias?
The following illustration was cooked up by our graphics designer. I will refer to this and subsequent illustrations in the discussion about our hypothetical customer Josephine Smith (apologies to the real Joe Smith). Joe's primary address at Vineyard.NET is joe@vineyard.net because this was the name of her account.
Figure 1
A mail alias is an entry in a table which the mail delivery system reads as the first step in determining where each message ought to go. Usually an alias does nothing more than provide an additional name for an account. Joe has several:
- joey
- josie
- joe_smith
Figure 2
Another use of mail aliases is to forward mail. Joe has added a forwarding alias which routes mail destined for joe@vineyard.net to joe_travel@ibm.net while she is speaking at a conference in Kyoto. Mail sent to joey@vineyard.net (and any of the other pseudonyms) will also be forwarded because the pseudonym addresses are first resolved to Joe's account joe@vineyard.net, before an attempt is made to deliver the message.
A mail alias is not an account.
A mail alias is not a separate account from the account to which it directs incoming mail. An alias allows you to offer users of e-mail an opportunity to use an alternate name (a pseudonym) when they send you mail. An alias does not have a password. An alias cannot be used to authenticate anywhere at Vineyard.NET. All mail sent to the alias will be mixed in with the mail actually sent directly to the aliased account.
If you want a separate password, a separate login, than an alias simple doesn't do what you want. You may need an additional dial-up account. You may want to add additional POP mailboxes. Joe uses two POP mailboxes (joebiz@vineyard.net and msmith@vineyard.net) in addition to her aliases.
A mail alias can help two users share a computer.
Yes, to a degree folks can share a single account if it really is on one computer. It is a bit tricky. The folks sharing the account will have to be willing to learn some of the underlying technology. They also have to be very polite to one another. Otherwise they will be reading and/or interfering with each other's mail.
An alias simply redirects mail. So if Sally and Phred want to share an account, Sally creates an account called sally, and has us set up an alias, phred, which points to sally. Mail sent to phred@vineyard.net arrives in sally@vineyard.net's mailbox file. But they are all mixed together.
There is a distinct difference between the mail sent to phred and that sent to sally: the To: field. Those sent to phred will have her address; those sent directly to sally will have hers. A mail client capable of filtering incoming mail can do interesting things with this distinction. Current releases of Eudora (both the free Lite and the commercial Pro varieties) have the ability to sort messages into separate mailboxes. Those with the string "phred" will be transfered to the mailbox "phred" and those with the string "sally" will be transferred to the box "sally."
As long as Phred and Sally are polite, there will be no trouble keeping track of their separate incoming mail.
A similar game needs to be played for outgoing mail. Every outgoing message has a return address set in the From: (and other fields). Current releases of Eudora (both the free Lite and the commercial Pro varieties) have the concept of personalities. Phred and Sally can each configure an individual personality within Eudora. As long as they remember who they each are when they are using the program, they will each have their own From: headers and signatures, etc.
I cannot speak here to all mail clients or even all operating systems. Some mail programs allow you to create multiple configurations; so you don't have to remember to edit the configuration each time you use the program. If you do feel that this is an option you wish to pursue, contact your VNI Reseller for assistance.
You can create your own mail alias.
You can create your own alias for your Vineyard.NET account.Mail aliases inside your private domain.
VNI's defaults for your domain.
Figure 3
If you have your own domain (or sub-domain) registered at Vineyard.NET, our mail system allows you to specify the addresses within your domain. By default, any mail addressed to any name within your domain will be delivered to your Vineyard.NET account. You can elaborate on the default if you wish.
A useful term to define for this discussion is namespace. In the context of mail addresses, a domain's namespace is the list of all names to which mail can be addressed. At Vineyard.NET, the namespace includes all customer accounts, their aliases, and our administration aliases. Each name within a namespace has to be unique. There can only be one postmaster in the vineyard.net namespace.
Since there can be only one of each name, this can quickly cause difficulties if you have have your own domain and yet have to limit your names to those available within Vineyard.NET. You will find that certain important names are already taken e.g. sales@vineyard.net, or admin@vineyard.net.
If you have several domains, you can set up some of them as clone domains. A clone domain is a domain in which all of the email aliases are mirrored from another domain.
The Internet and the protocols that it relies upon were never intended to be used to create fictitious computers. But a virtual domain is indeed just a fiction. Mail cannot be delivered to a computer which does not actually exist. Instead, mail intended for fictional computers must be rerouted to a real address.
An example of domain aliases.
Figure 4
Joe has configured a fairly elaborate set of aliases for her domain joe.com. She has added several specific names to joe.com's namespace:
- joe@joe.com
- joey@joe.com
- joe_smith@joe.com
- sales@joe.com
- info@joe.com
- webmaster@joe.com
- joe_japan@joe.com
Note that it does not matter at all that Joe has chosen to route some joe.com names to real addresses and some to pseudonyms. As long as the destination is a valid, deliverable address, the mail will arrive at its destination.
An example blocking unspecifed names.
Figure 5
Sometimes it may not be desirable to receive mail to unspecified names. If you turn this feature off, any unspecified addresses will be returned to sender with the error User Unknown...
In Figure 5, Joe has opted to leave her namespace as before; but she has decided that all the junkmail being addressed to spam-me-silly@joe.com has become far too annoying. By turning off the default delivery of all unspecified mail, mail addressed to spam-me-silly@joe.com (and any other adresses which Joe hasn't added to her list) will be refused with the error User Unknown...
Blocking all mail.
Figure 6
Finally, due to the merger of JoeBiz and BobBiz, Joe has turned off all mail delivery to joe.com until the reorganization of the new company is finalized and Joe has some sense of where she wants her mail to be delivered.