Tutorial: Setting Up WebMail

Help, configuration and tips.

Tutorial: Setting Up WebMail
This page explains how to take advantage of the built in WebMail facility and also how you to personalize its look and feel. Other information includes advice on how to run WebMail and a webserver together and also how to setup your own email service. For more detailed information on each option of the 'WebMail Settings' dialog, visit the WebMail Settings section.

The Advantages of WebMail
Although email clients provide quick and powerful management of your mail, they do lack certain flexibility required by people on the move. Mail clients are flawed because they have to be installed on every machine you wish to access your mail from. This means that accessing your mail from multiple computers costs money and can be complicated. WebMail solves all these problems and remains just as useful as a mail client. It provides access to your mail through any standard web browser and from anywhere in the world, ensuring that any computer is capable of accessing your mail. The facility also has built in support for address books (contact lists), folders to help organize your mails and the ability to send mails. If you run a large company then WebMail has even more benefits as there would be no need to pay for expensive mail clients, potentially saving you thousands.

Using WebMail
The WebMail facility is basically an integrated webserver which has its own built in script system. The pages displayed in the WebMail system are simply HTML files and normal GIF graphics. These HTML files are generated from template HTML files which contain tags to indicate where certain information should be inserted (eg. ####USERACCOUNT#### gets replaced with the User/Login). When a user accesses a particular page, the template file is loaded, processed and then sent to the user.

Configuration
By default, WebMail should work without any further configuration but often you may wish to adjust certain options. Using the WebMail Settings dialog you can adjust the number of mails displayed on each page of the Inbox, control how many logged in sessions are permitted and more. At the very bottom on the dialog you can select which template is enabled. Ability Mail Server comes installed with 3 standard templates which should be sufficient for your needs. However, these templates are also intended to form the base of any customization you may wish to create. These templates are located in the 'webmail' folder inside the main Ability Mail Server folder (usually located in c:\Program Files\Code-Crafters\Ability Mail Server).

Ability Mail Server also supports an option to allow users to automatically create their own email accounts, which is fully controlled by the 'Automatic Sign-ups' tab. You can control what domains users can sign up on, adjust how their User/Login is created, enable notifications to the administrator, and control what group the new accounts should be placed in. More information on using this feature is available below.

Editing the Templates
You can find detailed information on how this is done by going to the Editing WebMail Templates section.

Running WebMail and a Web Server Together
By default WebMail runs on port 8000 and so should not interfere with a web server. However, the problem with this is that you must place the port value after your domain when accessing the facility (eg. http://www.yourdomain.com:8000). The sections below describe different ways in which you may wish to get around the problem.

Integrated Login Form
If you have an understanding of HTML forms then this method may work for you. The index.html template page contains a simple HTML POST form which contains only 2 or 3 fields. These are 'user', 'pass' and the optional 'extra' field. This form could be placed directly onto your normal website and then by adjusting the POST action field of the form to something like http://www.yourdomain.com:8000/_login, the form will log users into WebMail and at the same time move them onto the other port.

Multiple IP's
If you your server computer has multiple IP's assigned then WebMail could be integrated into your site seamlessly. By ensuring your web server listens only on a certain IP, WebMail could be set to listen on another IP. This would then allow you to run WebMail on port 80 and so permit normal access using http://www.yourwebmaildomain.com.

Redirection
If you have access to a service which performs redirections then you could setup a domain or sub-domain which performs a redirection to the WebMail facility. This would allow your users to access your site by something such as http://webmail.yourdomain.com which would then automatically take them to http://www.yourdomain.com:8000.

Running Your Own 'Sign-up' Email Service
Online email services which provide WebMail are currently very popular with Internet users as they provide 'no-ties' email access from anywhere. This provides a great platform for advertisements, marketing, research and potential profit making. Ability Mail Server has a feature called 'Automatic Sign-ups' which allow you to run such WebMail services. The following sections offer advice on certain aspects of an email service which are possible with Ability Mail Server.

Selling Advertising Space
The WebMail templates used by the facility are just simple HTML files which can be edited using any standard HTML editor (eg. Front-page, Dreamweaver, Notepad...etc.) By editing the templates you can not only personalise the look, but you could also add advertisements. This opens up the possibility of selling advertising space. Additionally, you could also sell upgrades to your users which would then remove the advertisements (read the next section to see how).

Selling Upgrades
Because you can assign new sign-ups to a particular group, you could place them in a restricted 'free' group. This group could have a small account allocation limit and maximum mail size and could even prevent access to POP3 and IMAP4. You could then allow your users to buy upgrades which would entitle them to larger allocation limits and even additional access to services such as POP3 and IMAP4, which would be possible by simply moving them into a different group.

If you wanted to advertise on the 'free' accounts pages and not on the paid accounts, you could create an entry in the 'Domain Specific Templates' list that would map the advertising template to a particular domain (eg. www.freewebmailaccess.com). Then by setting the 'free' group to be limited to that WebMail domain, it would force the 'free' users to only be able access their mail through the advertising template. Your paid users would be able to access a different domain which has no advertising.

Collecting More Information During Sign-up
By default, the sign up page only collects information such as full name, address, telephone number and email address. By simply editing the _signup.html template page you could add any extra fields you require. When a user completes a sign-up, you can enable an email to sent to the administrator. This email will contain the entire contents of the sign-up form (including any additional fields you add) and so allow you to archive the information in any way you wish.

Emailing All Your Sign-up Users
If you assign your sign-up users to a particular group then you can simply use the Accounts Browser to send an email to all the users. To send an email to only the sign-up users you can use 'Filter All' to only display the accounts in the sign-up group. Then by selecting 'Send Email to All' you can place a message in each account Inbox.