Using the Vorras Mailer Administration Interface

• Changing the administration Password: Please note that Password is Case Sensitive! Please make sure you change the password as soon as possible.
• Edit domain names: Use this if you want to add additional domain names. Vorras Mailer can work with unlimited number of domain names.
• Edit IMAP servers: If you are operating Vorras Mailer as a web interface to existing IMAP accounts use this to add IMAP servers if your system has multiple. These IMAP servers can be on any machines on the internet.
• Edit SPAM lists: Add addresses that you would like to disable completely. If someone sends email from these addresses, the email will not be delivered (Blacklisting). Currently you can only blacklist whole email addresses.
• Edit users: This will enable you to see all users and to delete users if necessary. Users are shown alphabetically by username. You can also view the disk space used by each user, allowing you to identify users that are exceeding their quotas (see below for quota management).
• Edit HTML: select an HTML file (all HTML files in the templates end with .txt) and edit it. This allows the administrator to customize the look of Vorras Mailer. First select the template you wish to use or create a new one before making changes to the html files. See Section 8 for more information.
• Main domain name: this should reflect the main domain name you selected when you ran the install.py script. If you wish to change that it is recommended that you re-install Vorras Mailer by running the install.py script (see README file in distribution).
• Main script name: This is the name of the main script running Vorras Mailer whose default name is index.cgi. Change it to a name of your choice, but do not forget to also rename the index.cgi file to the new filename in the Vorras Mailer directory. This can be accomplished by executing the command:
  • mv index.cgi new_filename.cgi
• Path to a directory stroring images: This is a directory where all the image files (buttons etc.) used by Vorras Mailer are stored. This directory must be viewable by a web browser. An example would be: /home/www/htdocs/images/mailer/
• URL of directory storing images: Same as above but as a web address (URL) including the http part, e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/images/mailer/
• Path to a directory for mime attachments: location of where server will store email attachments.
• URL for mime attachments: same as above but instead of the path please specify the URL.
• Select HTML template: use this option to control the appearance of your installation. You can use one of the predefined templates, or create your own. See section 8 for more information.
• Select Language File: change this to display all text messages in a different language. This should be used in combination with the HTML template, to create interfaces in different languages. For more information see Section 9.
• Disk space per user in bytes: default is set at 4 Mbytes. To allow each e-mail user more space type in desired amount. To see each user's space click on ``Edit users'' (see above). When a user goes over the limit a warning message appears in his mailbox.
• Absolute disk space limit per user in bytes: If a user violates this limit he/she will not receive any more emails. All incoming emails are bounced back to the sender. This can be set equal to the disk space per user in bytes (see previous) to enforce strict adherence to account size management, or can be set to a value 1-2Mb higher than the disk space per user in bytes to allow users some time to delete their email.
• Maximum attachment size in bytes: This holds the maximum allowable attachment size when composing messages. If a user attempts to send a larger attachment Vorras Mailer gives an error message and asks the user to reduce the size of the attached files.
• Enable Administrator login on any account: allows the administrator to enter any user's account using the administsrator password. You may wish to disable this option because if someone manages to get hold of the administrator password, then he/she will be able to access any email account. If however, you frequently need to login into your users' accounts, you may set this to ``Yes''.
• Mailhost: Type in your Mailhost; this is typically localhost. If you do not know what to insert here leave it as localhost.
• Select which sendmail to use: Insert here the full path to the location of sendmail. To locate sendmail on your system type ``which sendmail'' on the UNIX shell. On most systems, when running the installation script install.py the path for sendmail is retrieved automatically. If not please first locate the path to the sendmail program on your system. Subsequently edit the file ThelibInit found in the data directory and change the line containing globals.sendmail as follows:
  • globals.sendmailPath = "/path/to/sendmail"

• Enable sending mail to external addresses: typically this is set to ``yes'' to allow users to send email to any email address on the internet. If however, you want to use Vorras Mailer only as an internal messaging system where users can only send to other Vorras Mailer users on the same platform and same domain name, set this to ``no''.
• Use Procmail: specify whether you want incoming email to be handled by procmail. This has the advantage of avoiding the use of cron jobs to read incoming email from a ``catch-all'' mailbox, speading up delivery. If you do use Procmail build your recipe such that it pipes all incoming email to the dispatch.py script in the Vorras Mailer distribution. If however your system does not have Procmail or you do not wish to use it, set this to ``no''. For more information, please look at Section 4.1.
• If you do not wish to use Procmail select path to catch-all mailbox: if your answer to the previous question is ``no'' you will need to specify a mailbox that receives all incoming email. In addition you will have to set dispatch.py to run as a cron job. See appendix A for more details on cron jobs.
• Send email to Admin for every incoming email: You can set this to yes if you wish to receive email everytime a user receives an email. You can use this as debugging mechanism when you first install Vorras Mailer, however, as your user base grows you may wish to disable this future to avoid clogging your mailbox with notification emails. If you set this to ``yes'' please make sure you set the debugEmail and bounceBackEmail variables in the disglobals.py script to your personal email address.
• If cleanup.py is set up as a cron job schedule automatic email deletion: the cleanup.py script can be used to automatically delete emails for all users that are older than a number of days. This can be used to prevent users from keeping messages in their mailboxes for long periods of time. Normally you would leave this to its default value i.e. ``never''. However if you are running Vorras Mailer on a system with limited space, you may want to consider limiting your users ability to store emails indefinetely.
• Allow users to send email using any email address as the sender address: This option if set to ``yes'' will allow your users to compose messages and send them using any email address they wish even if the email address does not belong to them. This may be dangerous because your users may abuse it to falsify their identities. However, it may be useful when your users are using Vorras Mailer to consolidate various accounts and wish to change their return addresses when replying to messages on their other accounts. For example if a user is using the remote email access capability and checks his email at username@remotedomain.com, he may want to respond to a message using that email address and not the one offered by your Vorras Mailer installation. If you do set this option to ``yes'' you may need to state in your terms of service page that using email addresses that do not belong to a user is strictly prohibited.
• Set a maximum email sending limit per day: this variable is used to set a limit for sending messages, so that your users cannot use Vorras Mailer to send thousands of spam messages. If, for example, you set this value to 100, that will prevent each one of your users from sending more than 100 emails per day.
• If you answered ``Yes'' above set maximum number of emails per day: use this variable to control the total number of messages your users can send per day. If you are concerned about spammers using Vorras Mailer to launch spam attacks set this variable to a reasonably low value to prevent them from sending emails to thousands of email addresses.
• Set a maximum number of recpients per email: this variable allows you to set a limit in compose forms, so that your users cannot insert large number of recipients in their To: ,Cc: and Bcc fields. The purpose of this variable is to stop spammers from using Vorras Mailer to send email.
• Allow registering the same username across all domain names: if you have many domains on your system you may wish to allow separate registration of a username on all domains. For example, if you set this variable to ``Yes'' you will be able to register john@yourdomain1.com, and john@your domain2.com, etc.
• Use Vorras Mailer to read existing IMAP accounts only: if this is set to ``yes'' Vorras Mailer will not offer email accounts to any user; it will only be used to access remote email accounts through IMAP.
• If your answer to the above question was yes, specify IMAP server (type none if you do not want to use IMAP): specify primary imap server e.g. imap.somedomain.com. To add more servers click on the ``Edit IMAP servers'' link (see above).
• Specify From address for your users: if you are using Vorras Mailer only as a platform to connect to remote IMAP accounts, specify the domain from where your users will be sending outgoing email, e.g. yourdomain.com.
• If you are using Vorras Mailer to connect to IMAP accounts only specify whether you want to use local files to store user information: set this to ``yes'' if you want to store user information. This will enable Vorras Mailer to remember user preferences.

Note that if you are using Vorras Mailer only as an interface to existing IMAP accounts you need to run the mailerd.py as a daemon. To do so go to the directory where Vorras Mailer is located and simply execute the following command on the UNIX shell:

./mailerd.py &