The SMTP Service can handle an indefiniate number of mail boxes with up to 30 aliases each. This means you could set up a mail box for "david" which will receive mail to "dave" or "david". It can also handle an indefinate number of "receivers" of the same mail message (e.g. when you select multiple receipients of the same mail message or Carbon Copies in your mail client). In this case the mail message is broken up into lots of individual mail messages then each message is treated individually.
Mail message length is limited by the system, not the program, therefore MIMEd email messages of several MB are not a problem.
SMTP can log the source (claimed and real), destination and size of all mail messages it handles. This can be useful for spotting unusually high use of the mail service by individuals within an organisation.
The Service is multi-threaded. This means that the service can
handle multiple connections from other mail servers at the same
time and distribute the messages correctly. The number of threads
is configurable although we have only five.
The SMTP service also provides all the list server functionality.
You may set up a "list manager" which will accept the JOIN, LEAVE and
HELP commands. The list manager may control one or more lists. When
a user mails a list, the mail is duplicated and forwarded to every member
of the list. The people who can join and post to a list may be resitricted
or left open. This allows several different types of lists to be
created:
On successful connection the entire mail box is read and
re-written after the
POP Server has finished with it. While the mail box is held for
reading, no mail can be accepted for the user (but it will not be
lost since the sending post will try again later).
The POP Server is multi-threaded. This means that more than one
client can access the mail at the same time. The number of threads
required is surprisingly small since most clients take about
0.5 seconds to check the mailbox and only do it every (say) 10
minutes then potentially you could have 10*60*2 = 1200 clients using
only one POP thread. Obviously you are going to run into problems at
that point especially if you have some clients on a slower network
connection (e.g. PPP or SLIP). Therefore we suggest five threads and
if you have complaints, simply increase the number!
The post daemon can be configured to attempt to send mail on any
(or none) of the following events:
POST is multi-threaded and the most difficult to configure regarding
the optimum number of threads. The optimum number of threads depends
upon your link to your outbound mail server. If you have a low speed
link (e.g. 64Kbaud) you will need to have fewer threads because you
may have a couple of large mail messages waiting and each will time
out. If there is no link restriction - this is not a problem!
We recommend three POST threads for a 64Kbaud line and five otherwise.
"PULLMAIL was originally written by Mark Woollard of 7th Wave Software Ltd.
to interface NTMAIL with Frontier Internet Services Ltds email forwarding system.
Mark has now produced a general purpose version suitable for
use with any POP based internet service provider.
For further information and support for PULLMAIL please email
pullmail@swsoft.co.uk. For details of Frontier Internet Services Ltd.
email info@ftech.net or take a look at http://www.ftech.net"
2. POP Service
The Post Office Protocol Server will accept connections from all
remote clients and then insist on username and password being
correct before details of mail are released. Each time a username and
password are incorrect the details are logged. Note that two users with
different usernames and passwords
may have access to the same mail box (if that's how you want to
set it up). In addition POP will automatically encrypt passwords
so that they cannot be read directly from the registry.3. POST Service
The post daemon handles all out going mail. It checks the
directory for messages that have yet to be sent, reads the
destination of the mail and then attempts to connect to the
destination mail server. If it fails, it will try the gateway.
Once a connection has been made the mail will be sent onbound. Any
error after the connection has been made (e.g. User unknown) will
cause the message to be re-routed back to the message source
with the error message inserted to inform the sender of the mail.
(If this has already happened, we have infinitly bouncing mail, so
the POST services will re-route the mail to the root account).
We recommend having the Timed option set to (say) 9 minutes.4. MAIL Utility
This program will perform lots of different actions all to help with
the running of NTMAIL. There are several diagnositic options (look up
MX and CNAMEs), a
mail-to option, an option to get the
services to re-read the registry, load
the registry from a script file
and lastly some routines for helping with
dialup connections.
The MAIL utility will accept a sequence of commands and work though
them one after another.
5. NT PULLMAIL V1.0
PULLMAIL is a simple command line utility to pull email from
a pop account and send it to an SMTP server. It looks for
a To: or Apparently-To: field in the header of each email
and uses this in the RCPT-TO command to the SMTP server.