Email addresses are two parts - you can think of them as being like a postal address with the name of the recipient and the address of the building to deliver the mail to.
Eventually, the address ends up at a mailbox or pigeon hole.
Can you
explain about some of this terminology?
Email addresses are a way of sending mail to a mailbox rather like a letter to an address. There are two parts, the piece before the @ identifies the mailbox while the piece after the @ refers to the mail server (you could think of the mail server address as like a postal address for a building and the mailbox as being the pigeon hole for the person in the building)
For example,
consider the addressesenquiries@mycompany.co.uk
and
enquiries@anothercompany.com
So, in the first case the mail system will look for a mailbox called enquiries at mycompany.co.uk , while in the second it is looking for a mailbox also called enquiries at anothercompany.com which is a completely different address - basically two different 'buildings'.
Now that's not a problem -
many people use more than one email accounts on different servers and you can read mail from different accounts quite easily, you just need to point your mail client at the mail addresses you wish to read. Some email clients let you have more than one 'identity' to read from multiple email addresses some let you do it in one go. We have a web mail client which lets you read from more than one mailbox at a time. See our later information about How can I read more than one email account at once?- Mailbox
- this is where the mail actually resides in an area on a mail server which you access with a username and password. You can think of this as being like a labelled pigeon hole. The pigeon hole doesn't have to necessarily have the same name as the email address - so mail for sales@mycompany.co.uk doesn't necessarily go into a mailbox called sales. At Xhost we usually name the mailboxes with your company details first, for example sales@acme.co.uk would go into a mailbox called acme.sales
- Alias
- this is where more than one email address resolves to the same mailbox. For example, mail sent to sales@mycompany.co.uk and info@mycomapny.co.uk might both end up in a mailbox called allmail. Another use of aliases might be to redirect mail from a generic department name to a real person. For example, you can redirect sales@yourcompany.com to your sales manager's mailbox, or marketing@yourcompany.com to your marketing manager.
- Forward
- this is like an alias but as well as being able to forward mail sent into one mailbox into antoher this also gives you the ability to send the mail on to another mailserver entirely. So for example mail sent to sales@mycompany.co.uk could be forwarded to sales@anothercompany.com.
- Auto-Responders
- these are automatic email accounts which will reply directly to customers without you needing to be involved. For example, you can set an auto-responder to automatically deliver a file containing information on your company's products when a customer sends a request to products@yourcompany.com. You can either set a fixed message to be sent or you can let your customers request particular files - this might be more appropriate for staff or suppliers so they can request ordering procedure documents etc.
- Mailing lists
- The mailing list functions
provided by a list server allow a user to send a single piece of email to
multiple recipients. This is a widely used feature not only for mass
mailings, but also for moderated discussion groups. Xhost’s list server is
extremely powerful and allows many configuration options, which make the
list server valuable in a number of contexts. It also provides extremely
high performance (speed measured by how many mail messages may be sent out
in a specified period of time).
Mailing lists are very powerful - they allow you to send mail to many correspondents with a single command. They may be used internally (for example, to send mail to the whole sales department) or externally (for example, to send mail to all registered users of one of your products). Mailing lists have many uses and configurations. You can set up a list with only the members on it that you choose, or you can set up a list anyone can join by sending a subscription request to your mail server. You can set the list up so that it functions as a discussion group in which any member can send mail to all the other members, or you can set it up more like a broadcast medium so that only you can send messages
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Another solution some people use - which I think was referred to in your welcome email - is to have lots of email addresses which people can use, say sales@mycompany.co.uk, info@mycompany.co.uk, enquiries@mycompany.co.uk etc but then to set up forwarding so that all the mail to those addresses goes into the same mailbox or pigeon hole.
It seems to me that this is a problem in two parts. Do you want the mail to go to the derbycab.cabnet.org.uk 'building' or to the derbycab.org.uk 'building' ? Then having decided that then you need to set up the mail client (Outlook, Eudora or Web mail) to read the mail from whichever pigeon hole (or holes) in whichever 'building' you would like (if you have colleagues perhaps you need a different setup for different people).
As it is currently set your Frontpage forms are sending the mail to the mycompany.co.uk 'building' if that's not what you wanted to happen then you simply need to change the mailto address for the Front page forms. If it iswhat you wanted, and as there are no errors when the email is sent to that address it seems to be being received ok, then you need to point a mail client for your colleague at that address to see what email is being sent there or you need to ask the people looking after that email system to set it up to forward that email to another address which your colleague can read from.
On the other hand if you are happy reading mail from our 'building' then we could set up a bureau@derbycab.org.uk which could either be a mailbox (pigeon hole in my example above) with its own password or it could forward into your Joan.Dryburgh pigeon hole (though if, as I think you suggest in your email you want a colleague to read the mailbox in that mailbox then a separate box would probably be best so the mail doesn't get muddled up together with your personal mail). You would then change the Frontpage form to send to bureau@derbycab.org.uk and would read and collect mail from that server.
Also on 4/9/00 I told you we wanted the e-mails to be answered by staff at that address. If it wasn't going to work it would have been useful to know that before I went on 3 weeks holiday.Got your telephone message & e-mail. I shall change the addresses to techmail etc and try it out.
If you use Eudora, then you can change your password
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So how do I decide how many email addresses, forwards etc I want?
The answer to this depends on how you would like it to work. As explained above, if you think of it in terms of how many different pigeon holes you would like to use and who wants to use which pigeon hole I think it might make deciding what you want to do easier.
I do hope that is slightly clearer and helps you to make better sense of what we're trying to say? Choices are a tricky thing really, they give you great flexibility but they can make choosing the right one very tricky!
How
can I read more than one email account at once?
I am seeing an error message like
One thing that would be helpful to know is how we can access all our
accounts at once, i am aware of how to check, for example the media account
or the info account (qds.media and qds.info) but is there a way that we can
check all the accounts at once? (im thinking like qds.all or something like
that.....) i dont have a problem with setting up the 5 accounts, but it
seems the engineer would like to work differently....
Well yes, as often the answer in internet land you can - there are choices! Though if using Outlook is a requirement then the choices are limited...
Outlook friendly1) Don't have them as separate mailboxes, forward them all into a single mailbox (or two) and read that.
Pros easy,
Cons makes replying messy as you aren't always necessarily aware which account got the mail though you can set up filters to differentiate the mail. This one is well worth thinking about if many of the mailboxes do effectively the same thing.
2) Use an email client which lets you read multiple accounts.
For example, Eudora lets you have multiple personalities (I have about 15 standard ones and six testing ones) which means you can read lots of different accounts, use filters to move the mail into different filing areas and it will automatically select the right stationery and signature for whichever personality you received the mail as when you're composing a reply.Pros powerful and easy to use once set up, integrates well so clicking mail links in browser will use Eudora etc
Cons Not Microsoft...
3) You can do fiddly things with Outlook to make life easier - or link an Outlook profile with a login profile and log off and on when you want to change mail.
For instance in Outlook 2000 (not sure which version you've got) you can use Tools > Options > Mail Services tab > Prompt for a profile to be used
Pros It's Microsoft
Cons Not as elegant as Eudora (in my humble opinion!)
4) Use a web mail client (we have one if you don't have a current favourite) which consolidates mail from many mail boxes
Pros reading's pretty easy
Cons but not so good for sending but if you don't often reply to emails theres no reason you couldn't read this way but send emails from Outlook etc.