Confused by guide to email management portal

[John Aldred]

I am shortly to be migrated to the new mail system, and have been
reading the guide to the email management portal. I'm not sure that I
understand what they mean by an administrator alias.

I want to be able to use web mail and have the From address as a name of
my choice and not Administrator.

Do I achieve this by following the instructions in Section 4 - Adding a
User, and then ticking the Administrator box and the Is Active box?

Or do I try to follow the instructions in Section 5 - The Administrator
Alias. This is where I get confused. The screen shots appear to show the
editing of a previously added user (Joe Bloggs) by the addition of a new
email address and making it the primary address. There is no mention of
ticking the Administrator box. It also mentions deleting the
Administrator username! But it shows the Joe.bloggs email address
highlighted for deletion.

Apologies for being a bit thick :-(

--
John Aldred

[Cliff Frisby]

John Aldred wrote:

> I am shortly to be migrated to the new mail system, and have been
> reading the guide to the email management portal. I'm not sure that I
> understand what they mean by an administrator alias.

I hope I don't say anything too misleading, but as no one else has replied,
I will risk having a go.

I think that by "administrator alias" they just mean "the particular email
address 'admini...@yourdomain.demon.co.uk'"

My model of how things work (gleaned from my brief and abortive testing, and
perusing the headers), is that incoming mail is inspected by some
Postfix-based triage system, before reaching the MS Exchange part, to see
whether each recipient (envelope) address has been assigned to one of your
domain's mailboxes. How it performs such an interrogation is a mystery to
me, not that I lose any sleep over it.

(Note also that one mailbox can be configured to be the destination for
several email addresses, with precisely one address assigned 'primary'
status.)

If the answer is 'no' for any (envelope-)address, i.e. the address is not
assigned explicity to a mailbox, then the address in question is replaced
by the particular address admini...@yourdomain.demon.co.uk. (Oh, and
before anyone asks: no that doesn't mean the To: line gets modified; it's
the *real* recipient list which is being manipulated.)

The message is then submitted into the MS Exchange system, which uses the
(envelope-)address in the normal way. (I guess duplicate
(envelope-)addresses are removed beforehand or ignored afterhand.)

I believe this is the extent of Demon's effort to attempt to simulate
multidrop for those like me who need it, although, as discussed at length
previously, it is clearly insufficient. It also explains why the system was
(and may still be) prone to issue bounce messages citing a
nonexisting "administrator@" address even though the sending side never
named that address.

>
> I want to be able to use web mail and have the From address as a name of
> my choice and not Administrator.

I think what you need to do, in that case, is to arrange a mailbox where
your preferred 'From:' address is set as the primary.

If you also want mail which is (envelope-)addressed to *any* left-hand part
@yourdomain.demon.co.uk (except the addresses you have assigned explicitly
to other mailboxes), to be delivered into that mailbox, then you also need
to associate the administrator@ address to that same mailbox.

>
> Do I achieve this by following the instructions in Section 4 - Adding a
> User, and then ticking the Administrator box and the Is Active box?
>

I *think* that assigning Administrator status to a mailbox, and associating
the adminstrator@ address to a mailbox, are two independent things. The
former would be more about whether the 'owner' of that mailbox can perform
certain more privileged operations.

If I'm right about that last point, then in principle a non-Administrator
mailbox could still have all the <unknownuser>@yourdomain.demon.co.uk
delivered to it, though it would be a bit of a unusual thing to do IMHO.

Also, I don't know whether you would have to actually create a new mailbox
and claim the 'administrator@' address for it, or whether you can simply
add your preferred address to the existing administrator mailbox (which
already has ownership of the 'administrator@' address) and then
give 'Primary' status to your preferred address within that mailbox. You
may be able to do either, but the second sounds more straightforward to me.

> Or do I try to follow the instructions in Section 5 - The Administrator
> Alias. This is where I get confused. The screen shots appear to show the
> editing of a previously added user (Joe Bloggs) by the addition of a new
> email address and making it the primary address. There is no mention of
> ticking the Administrator box. It also mentions deleting the
> Administrator username! But it shows the Joe.bloggs email address
> highlighted for deletion.
>
> Apologies for being a bit thick :-(

Please don't. If the answer was obvious, there would be more people
replying.

Caveat: Everything I've said here might be completely and utterly wrong, in
which case someone from Demon will be along shortly to correct...

>

[John Aldred]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I was beginning to think that I was the only
one who didn't understand something which was obvious to everyone else :-(

--
John Aldred