Managing your Email accounts in ISPConfig

Once logged into your Control Panel account (for an introduction to our Control Panel, see the introductory FAQ), you have access to a range of email account settings. You can:

1. Create, edit, and delete email domains
2. Create, edit, and delete email accounts
3. Create, edit, and delete email aliases and email forwarders
4. Manage email filters and autoresponders
5. Black or whitelist addresses in your spam filters

This FAQ will guide you through the basic email tasks using the ISPConfig Control Panel.

You access your Email settings by clicking on the Email icon in your Control Panel dashboard. This will get you to a screen showing an overview of your existing email domains (or none, if none have been configured).

The main part of the screen shows the configured domains – in this case the only domain configured is example.net. On the left hand side you have access to many more options.

1. Managing your Email domains

You can add a new domain (if you have another domain available in your hosting package) by clicking on the “Add new domain” button at the top of the domain overview, or you can edit a domain by clicking on a domain name.

The domain settings are few. You will need to add/edit:

• Domain name: enter the domain name if this is a new domain. Leave as is when editing an existing domain
• Spamfilter: the default spamfilter for all emails of this domain. Select from one of the options. We suggest to go for “Normal”, or if that leads to too much spam, choose “Spam Quarantine”. Note: the domain setting takes precedence over the settings for each email account. If you do not want a default, don’t enable this here.
• Active: make sure the “Active” box is ticked, otherwise you will not be able to use the domain.

Click “Save” when you are done.

To delete a domain, click on the wastebin to the right of the domain in the domain overview. Note: deleting the domain will delete all email accounts, and all emails.

2. Managing your email accounts (mailboxes)

To manage your email accounts, click on “Email Mailbox” on the left hand side. This brings you to the overview of existing mailboxes (which might be empty).

To add a new mailbox, click on “Add new Mailbox” add the top of the overview. To edit an existing mailbox, click on the mailbox account (Email).

 You need to fill in (or can edit) the following fields:

• Name (optional): You can give your mailbox a name. However, any display name might better be set in your email client.
• Email (required): The first part is a free text field, where you can enter whatever you want. This is the part of the email address before the ‘@’. The second is a select menu, where you need to select on of the domains available to you. This is the domain part of the email address.
• Password (required): You can either auto-generate a password or pick one. It will show you the password strength once you enter a password. Take note of the password – you will need it to access your email.
• Quota (optional): you can set a quota which needs to be smaller than the maximum quota of email and website combined.
• Send Copy To: this is a simple filter. It allows you to send copies of all received emails to another email address.
• Send Outgoing Copy To: this is a simple filter. It allows you to send copies of all emails you sent from this email address (using our mailserver) to another email address.
• Spamfilter: Here you can select from one of the existing spam policies. If a spam policy has been set for the domain, the domain setting will take preference.
• Enable receiving: this is ticket by default. If you untick this box, you will not be able to receive email on this mailbox.
• Disable SMTP (sending): if you tick this box, you will not be able to send from this address.
• Enable greylisting: Greylisting is one way to limit spam, but it will cause a delay on receiving email. You can enable greylisting for this mailbox here.
• Disable IMAP: Imap is one way to access mailboxes, used by many email clients, and required if you want to access your email via our webmail client.
• Disable POP3: Pop3 is another way of accessing mailboxes, mostly used to download emails. You can disable this, but it also does not cause harm to leave it enabled.

Once done, click “Save”.

It takes a couple of minutes for changes made in the admin interface to be rolled out to the mail server, but you can test you mailbox setup by visiting https://mailbox.grindersbox.com/webmail soon after.

Important: By default, a mailbox is NOT configured for backup. We therefore recommend you go back to editing the mailbox you just created, and click on the “Backup” tab:

We suggest you set the Backup interval to “Daily”, and leave the number of backup copies at “1”, which is the default.

This means the system will take a backup of your mailbox every night locally on the mail server. Our backup system backs up these backups every night onto a different storage device, so they are save even if the server should die unexpectedly.

If you do not set a backup interval, no backups will be taken, neither on the server nor offline.

3. Managing Email aliases

You can configure three kinds of aliases or forwarders:

• Email Alias: an alias is just that – another name for a mailbox. It is not another mailbox. If you have the mailbox mexample@example.net, and create an alias genderbender@example.net for the same mailbox, all email sent to genderbender@example,net will just end up in the mailbox mexample@example.net. You only can create aliases for emails accessible to you and configured via our Control Panel.
• Email Forward: a forward is similar to an alias, but allows to you forward the emails received on an address to an email you have with a different provider. For example, you could forward genderbender@example.net to info@genderbender.example.net. In this case, genderbender@example.net is not a mailbox, but purely a forwarding address. No mail would end up at genderbender@example.net.
• Email Catchall: A Catchall is a special kind of alias, and we would advice against using one (a catchall is above all a spamcatcher). If you have the mailbox mexample@example.net configured and enable email catchall, all email addressed to ANY address @example.net that is NOT a mailbox, an alias or a forwarder will end up in the receiving mailbox configured as catchall. That means – a lot of spam.

Configure an email alias

To configure an email alias, click on “Email Alias” on the left hand side. You will only be able to configure an alias if at least one mailbox has been added.

You have the following options:

• Email (required): the email or alias, consisting the name part and the domain part (the latter can be selected from the domains available to you)
• Destination (required): select one of the mailboxes you have configured.
• Active: ticked by default.
• Send as: ticket by default. This allows you to send emails with this alias (authenticating as destination mailbox)
• Enable greylisting: as with mailboxes.

Click “Save” to save your email alias.

Configure Email Forward

To manage your email forwarders, click on “Email Forward” on the left hand side. You will see all existing forwarders (if any exist). Click “Add Email Forward” to add a new forwarder, or click on an existing forwarder to edit it.

 The options are similar to Email Alias, with some differences:

• Email (required): add the name part of the email and choose one of the domains.
• Destination Email (required): add any destination email (one per line).
• Active: ticked by default
• Send as: similar to alias, but with some limitation. As a forwarder does not exist as mailbox account, logging in as the forwarder is not possible. This also means sending using our mailserver is only possible if a destination address is hosted on our mailserver. This address would then be able to also send using the forwarder as sender address.
• Enable greylisting: as for mailboxes.

Configure catchall

To manage the catchalls for your domains, click on “Email Catchall” on the left hand side. Click on “Add Email Catchall” to add a new catchall, or click on a listed catchall to edit an existing catchall.

For a catchall, you only need to select one of your configured domains and enter the destination email.

Again: we strongly recommend NOT to use catchalls, as they are above all spam catchers.

Manage Email filters and autoresponders

For each configured mailbox, you can manage automatic email filters using your Control Panel. You can also add or remove an autoresponder (vacation autoreply).

To manage email filters or an autoresponder, first click on “Email Mailbox” on the left hand side, and click on the mailbox for which you want to manage the filters or the autoresponder in the mailbox overview.

At the top, you see the following four tabs:

• Mailbox
• Autoresponder
• Mail Filter
• Backup

Manage Email filters

Select the tab “Mail Filter”.

Under the Mail Filter tab, you see an overview of existing mail filters. There is also a tick box for a special filter: Move Spam Emails to Junk directory. This means incoming Email identified as spam but below the cutoff level will no longer be delivered to your inbox, but be filtered to your Junk folder.

Click on “Add new Filter” to create a new Email filter:

You have the following options:

• Name: this is the name the filter will be identified with in the overview
• Source: what should the filter check for? You can filter by Subject, From (sender) or To (recipient).
• Condition: Below that you can select a condition: “contains”, “is”, “begins with”, “ends with”.
• Filter value: The third field is the filter value. For example, you could filter for “Subject” “Contains” “Viagra”.
• Action: What should be done for a mail fitting the filter above? You can choose “Move to” or “Delete”. If you choose “Move to”, write the name of the mailbox folder in the field below – make sure it is written exactly the same (upper and lower space, empty spaces).

Click on “Save” to finish.

Managing your autoresponder

Autoresponders are useful if you want to automatically let senders know that you are unable to reply (“out of the office”). To configure your autoresponder, click on the “Autoresponder” tab.

You can configure the following options:

• Subject: the subject line of the autoresponder email
• Text: the text of the message
• Enable the autoresponder: tick this to enable
• Start on: Set a start date for the autoresponder
• End by: Set an end date for the autoresponder

Click on “Save” to finish.

Note: you can also configure your autoresponder directly from your Roundcube webmail client.

Managing your spam black and whitelist

For each mailbox or for the entire domain you can manage a blacklist (or blacklisted sender addresses) and a whitelist (or whitelisted sender addresses).

Whitelist

On the left hand side, click on “Whitelist” under the Spamfilter heading.

You have the following options:

• User: the mailbox, alias, or the entire domain (this is a spamfilter user). Select from the dropdown list.
• Email: the email address to be whitelisted.
• Priority: select the priority. In case of conflict between different lists, the higher priority wins.
• Active: ticked by default.

Click “Save” to finish.

Blacklist

On the left hand side, click on “Blacklist” under the Spamfilter heading.

You have the following options:

• User: the mailbox, alias, or the entire domain (this is a spamfilter user). Select from the dropdown list.
• Email: the email address to be blacklisted.
• Priority: select the priority. In case of conflict between different lists, the higher priority wins.
• Active: ticked by default.

Click “Save” to finish.

Note: You can also manage the whitelist or blacklist for a mailbox (not for the entire domain or an alias) from Roundcube webmail.