Bytemark Virtual Host Mail
The mail part of our virtual hosting package uses Exim and Dovecot. Together these two applications provide SMTP handling, and POP3/IMAP access to hosted mailboxes.
Quick Guide
Here is a quick guide to getting started with the Bytemark VHost Mail package.
Setting up a new user's mailbox
To set up a new mail account for the user alice@example.com, the directory /srv/example.com/mailboxes/alice/ must be created. Any mail for alice@example.com will then be delivered to /srv/example.com/mailboxes/alice/Maildir. The subdirectory Maildir will be created automatically on delivery of the first message.
Setting a password for a user
To do this, create a file called password inside the user's mailbox directory. This password is used for all the mail services described on this page, with the user's email address as the username.
For example to set a password s3cr3t for alice@example.com, then the file /srv/example.com/mailboxes/alice/password needs to contain s3cr3t.
Collecting mail from a mailbox (IMAP/POP3)
Once a password has been set for a user, mail can be collected using IMAP or POP3, with or without SSL encryption. See our page on Client Configuration for more explicit information on how to set this up on end-users' mail user agents.
NB It is strongly recommended that SSL encryption is used for all communication to the server. If encryption is not used, passwords will be sent to the server in plain text.
NB2 Note that the username is the same as the email address!
Using your server for outbound mail (SMTP)
Again, once a password has been set up, authenticated SMTP relaying is also permitted. Once again, it is strongly recommended that SSL encryption is used for this service. See our page on Client Configuration for more explicit information on how to set this up on end-users' mail user agents.
Handling an existing domain's email elsewhere
If you don't want to handle any mail for a particular domain, just ensure that the mailboxes directory is removed. If this is the case, then email will be sent to the domain's existing MX records.
For example, if Alice decides that the mail for example.com should be handled elsewhere, she should remove the directory /srv/example.com/mailboxes.
