Your NetGate Hosting service allows you to send and receive mail using either UNIX shell or POP based mail clients. The NetGate Mail Funnel allows you to use any address (any_address@yourdomain) in your e-mail messages. This feature allows you to use an unlimited number of addresses under your domain (sales, support, joe, jane, etc.). In addition to the mail funnel additional e-mail aliases can be easily be added to your account to redirect e-mail for a specific address to other e-mail accounts. All mail addressed to your account should be of the form:

any_address@yourdomain

All mail addressed to yourdomain is stored on the same host where your web site resides. This allows you to use your choice of UNIX or POP based mail clients to read your mail. And if you don't want to read your mail from the NetGate server you can easily forward your mail to the e-mail address of your choice.

POP Based Mail

POP based mail clients are very easy to configure and use and usually offer a very nice graphical user interface. There are many excellent POP based mail clients available free of charge on the net. Most commercial Internet access software also includes a POP mail client. If you need a recommendation please let us know.

Since each mail program is slightly different it's difficult for us to give you detailed configuration information. All POP mail clients will require you to set several configuration options before you will be able to send or receive mail. Below is a listing of all known configuration options needed to configure all POP based mail clients.

where username is the name you received when you signed up and yourdomain is your domain name.

For example, if yourdomain is "jet.com" and your username is "joe" you would use the following settings:

We ask you to use your local access providers SMTP server to send mail to help us keep the net free of SPAM. If we allowed open access to our SMTP servers they would be used to relay SPAM and mail to and from our servers would be banned from a significant percentage of the mail servers on the Internet. Using your local access providers SMTP server will not change the way your e-mail message is represented to the world. The e-mail will still have your return address of "any_address@yourdomain".

POP Over SSL

For added security we support POP over SSL. Using SSL provides you with an encrypted data stream so none of your mail is transferred in clear text. To use POP over SSL configure your mail client to use SSL (most modern clients support SSL). POP over SSL is supported using TCP port 995.

The Mail Funnel

Any mail addressed to your domain will be funneled to your primary mailbox. As such you can advertise any e-mail address (at your domain) and mail destined for that address will be directed to your primary mailbox. To use a different e-mail address just change the "Return or Reply Address" setting in your POP client.

For example to become "sales@jet.com" instead of "joe@jet.com" you would use the following settings in your POP mail client.

Notice that the POP Account setting is still set to "joe@pop.jet.com". The POP Account setting doesn't change because it is the username assigned to your account. The "Return or Reply Address" can be changed to any name (sales, support, john, jane, etc.) and the mail will be funneled to your NetGate hosted mailbox.

Shell Based Mail

If you would like to use a shell based mail tool (pine, elm, or mail) use a telnet application to establish a terminal session with the host "www.yourdomain". Just telnet to www.yourdomain and login to the your UNIX shell account using your username and password. If your need more information on how to use the UNIX mail tools you can use the built-in "man" command available from the shell, for example type "man pine" to learn more about the pine mail client.

Mail Forwarding

Your shell account also allows you to control the forwarding of mail via the .forward (stored in your home directory) file. For example, if you worked at "url.com" and wanted to forward your mail to your e-mail account at work you would create a ".forward" file with a single line such as:

joe@url.com

Having the above line in your .forward file would cause all mail sent to any_address@yourdomain to be forwarded to joe@url.com.

Adding Aliases

An alias allows you redirect a specific e-mail address to another mail box. For example, you might want to redirect "sales@yourdomain" to "john@aol.com". If you want to add an alias to your domain please send an e-mail to support@netgate.net.

Adding POP Accounts

If you need an additional mailbox you can add a POP account. POP accounts are useful if you would like to have multiple people reading different mailboxes. With the POP account feature you could provide e-mail accounts for all your employees. For more information on adding a POP account to your account please e-mail sales@netgate.net.