Mail

Sending and receiving your society domain's email

This system allows you to simply and easily control all email addresses in your domain, and change them at will

. If it doesn't already exist, you need to create a directory in your home directory called 
mail_vut
.

Inside there, when you want to create new address (say testing@mydomain.man.ac.uk ) you need to create a file with the user part of the domain (in this case just "testing") with the email addresses of the people you want the mail to go to inside that file. ie you would have a file called 

testing
with the contents 
  an.address@foo.com
  another.address@stud.man.ac.uk
Please put one address per line. Also, the files *MUST* be UNIX text files (ie have a single line feed / carriage return) rather than a DOS text file (which has a two seperate characters for line feed and carriage return).

There are 2 example files there already (nobody and httpd) for you to copy. Both these two examples send mail to /dev/null (ie it is instantly deleted) because httpd is the webserver and it can't read mail (mostly bounces from mail sent out by CGI scripts). Nobody is a similar user. All addresses which are not defined go to your-username@umu.man.ac.uk

If you edit a file, you will want to run the command: 

	mail_vut-rebuild
which will prompt you for your password then go off and do the rebuilding. Changes should be visible in about 10 seconds.

Please note that you can only change domains for which you are authorised to change (ie ones you've told us about) and only registered users can rebuild the aliases. Also, in your domain, the email addresses root@, abuse@ and postmaster@ are considered special and will go to both your society address, and root@umu.man.ac.uk..

Also, if you have mailing lists, creating a file which clashes with the name of your mailing list is a bad idea, as it will break in unpredictable ways. Mailing lists are still handled centrally (and they always will be -- they can't be done using this system).

All email addresses not specified automatically go to the society account. If you wish to disable this, create a file .no-catchall in the mail_vut directory.

If have any questions or queries, mail root@umu.man.ac.uk and let us know.

The services described here are for University of Manchester Students' Union registered societies only. All requests must be made from yoursociety@umsu.man.ac.uk to root@umsu.man.ac.uk.