Multiple users - one email address/alias

[talha]

Hi All,

I have got 3 people working in a department - 2 are actually just helping out the manager (third person). They do basic tasks for the manager like scanning and sending a document to the customer. All three have their own email addresses, so the customer gets confused that who is this person sending me documents because they only know and deal with the manager.

I want to create a scenario where I use one email address/alias e.g. department@mydomain.com for all 3 people so to the customer it will always be the same person sending email regardless of the actual sender. Distributing incoming emails to all 3 people is not a problem the problem is if assistant 1 sends and email then how will the manager and assistant 2 know what he sent? if i use imap the sent email will come in the sent folder but still unless manager checks the sent items he would not know what emails have been sent.

is there a way that when asssistant 1 sends an email - the manager and assistant 2 get that email in inbox, similarly when manager sends mail both assistants get that in their inbox? and at the same the email address being used remains department@mydomain.com?

is there any preset configuration in AMS for this? if not can anyone suggest a good model for this?

P.S. sorry if this has been discussed before - i tried searching for this but the result said that my keywords are too common hence not checked - I think this should be fixed too.

[rob]

The best solution to this problem would be using a content filter rule. Basically you should create a rule which has the following conditions...

- If Sender Address matches "user1@xxx.com;user2@xxx.com;user3@xxx.com" - Case insensative and substring list mode.

And the actions...

- Send copy to "user1@xxx.com"
- Send copy to "user2@xxx.com"
- Send copy to "user3@xxx.com"
- Edit FROM header to department@xxx.com

The effect of this rule is that it would trigger on emails from those users, and would send all three a copy of the mail. IT would then modify the FROM address to appear as department address. A modification of this rule is that you create it 3 times, and avoid the sender receiver a copy themself.

[talha]

ok so this would mean that deparment@xxx.com will be an actual email account - and when recipients reply to department@xxx.com i will have to ensure that incoming mail is delivered to the users in the department?

[talha]

Hi Rob,

The above is not giving out what we wanted. I want to try another way please let me know if it is possible.
I use two domains one of which is just local and internal. So I give every user a unique email address @localdomain.com. So they can use this for all their internal communication. and I create an email address logistics@globaldomain.com.

AMS will pop3 retrieve logistics@globaldomain.com and deliver this to multiple addresses @localdomain.com -> this solves the receiving end.

As for the sending part lets say user1@localdomain.com sends an email to you rob@code-crafters.com. this is what I would like to happen: AMS adds more local recipients to this email and you receive this email from logistics@globaldomain.com instead of user1@localdomain.com but the added local recipients still receive it from user1@localdomain.com. Is this possible?

[talha]

no suggestions?

[rob]

The suggestion I provided would basicaly send a copy to the provided recpients, but to achieve what you need you would need to split the rule into 2 seperate rules. The first would send a copy of the original mail to the designated recipients, but if you wanted each user to recieve only mail that they send, then you could create a rule which activated on a specific from address, and sent copies to a specific email address. The final rule in the chain would look for mail from your users, and have a single action of editing the from header to match the generic email address.

[talha]

ok Thanks and understood.

one more question AMS does not relay email for local accounts and distributes it internally. Can I enable relay for particular local accounts? for e.g. my email address is talha@globaldomain.com and I also have globaldomain.com domain configured in AMS. so when users within my network send email to talha@globaldomain.com AMS simply puts it in my local inbox and it never reaches the inbox provided by hosting provider. Can I set AMS to relay messages sent to talha@globaldomain.com even if talha@globaldomain.com exists locally?

Thanks in advance

[Code Crafters]

Normally, you can use user redirections to relay mail on from local users to other email addresses. However, because the externall email address is the same as a local user, redirecting would only ever deliver locally.

Why do you want to host mail for a domain on 2 different mail servers anyway? Sometimes people use POP3 retrievals to download from their ISP or other mail server but then you'd never want to redirect back there or you may end up in an endless loop.

[talha]

Thanks Chris, actually am not using two servers persay. I am only using AMS as my local pop3 downloader and smtp relayer for users on my local network. There are some employees who work both on and off site so they dont have any local AMS account - as the machine hosting AMS is switched off every close of business day I cannot use it as my primary server plus its only local so one off site would have access to AMS even if it were running.

Now as I want to use 1 sender header for multiple users and keep their inboxes in sync plus for their internal communications I still wanted to use their own unique sender headers. I was thinking to use the condition any recipient does not exist locally to filter messages that require their header to be changed and other recipients added but now this will not work as some users dont exist locally in AMS but are in fact employees of the company.but this I can resolve by having two a different domain name on AMS from that of my hosting provider.

I have one more question: the from header on outgoing mails has two parts 1. the display name and 2. the sender address. for e.g. my mails go out as Talha Shakil (talha@globaildomain.com) the display name is configured by email clients in my case outlook. When AMS changes the Outgoing Header can I change both the Display name and sender address? If yes, please tell me how.

[Code Crafters]

If you use a different domain on your mail server to the external domain then set up individual user POP3 retrievals you can then redirect mail back out to the external using a static route for that external domain which relays directly to that mail server.

As for the content filter rule, use String CONTAINS in any conditions detecting header From address then you'll find it even if it is of the format Personal Name <user@domain.com>. For replacing this header field you can use the edit header line action for the From field with the text being of the same format Personal Name <user@domain.com> or just the email portion if you prefer. Note that these are just header fields and there is also an SMTP Sender to be set which along with the SMTP recipients is what's used to actually deliver the mail at the destination mail server. Headers are not used for delivery but are what the client will see when they open the mail.

[talha]

Thanks - can you please explain this a bit more I dont think I understood it 100%. "If you use a different domain on your mail server to the external domain then set up individual user POP3 retrievals you can then redirect mail back out to the external using a static route for that external domain which relays directly to that mail server."

Understood your point of From Header - so I should change the SMTP Sender too. And I guess SMTP sender only needs the sender email address and not the personal name?

[Code Crafters]

As you said any domains local to AMS will be delivered locally and not relayed. There is an option in the domain settings to control whether to allow relaying for users that don't exist on the domain though. If you download to a particular unique domain using POP3 retrievals then you can still use redirections to other domains in the user settings. You can also use static routes in outgoing mails to redirect particular domains direct to the destination mail server using relay mode. If this is still confusing, describe what you want and I'll try to explain how best to achieve that.

Yes, SMTP sender needs to be set and just the email address can be used for this.

[talha]

Thanks a lot. I think I have a handle on things - I will give it a try and if any problems I will come back to you.