Using the Catch-All Address
Use the catch-all address to route email that is sent to to your domain or Directra subdomain that does not match any routing address you have defined. Define your catch-all address using the Email section of the Settings tab.
Here are your options for the catch-all address:
- A Blank Address: Directra will send a bounce reply message to the sender, saying that the email address is unknown.
- A target email address: Directra will forward all unknown email to the specified address.
- Several target addresses: This is really the same as the option 2, above, except that you can have the email routed to any number of email address. Simply separate the addresses using a comma.
- A single domain name of the form @domain: Directra will forward the message to name@domain, where name is the name part of the original target address. For example, let's say you have defined the catch-all to be @mydomain.com. If Directra receives a message addressed to joe@myigroup.directra.com, and this address is not a routing address, Directra will route the message to joe@mydomain.com.
This form of catch-all is useful if you already have a domain and an mail routing system in place, with various addresses defined, and you want all of those addresses to be valid in your new Group domain. For example, let's say Tom owns the domain tomsdomain.com. He creates the Group TomsWorld, and he wants all of his tomsdomain.com addresses also to be valid addresses in the tomsworld.directra.com domain, without going to the trouble of explicitly defining member or tag addresses for all of them. By setting his catch-all to @tomsdomain.com, all of his tomsdomain.com email addresses will automatically be valid addresses in tomsworld.directra.com.
- A mail server host name or a domain name with defined MX records: Directra will route the message to the specified host or domain, with the address unchanged. For example, let's say you define the catch-all address to be mail.myserver.com. When Directra receives a message for the unknown address someguy@mydomain.com it will relay the message to the mail server mail.myserver.com, with the address unchanged. (The assumption is that mail.myserver.com knows what do do with email addressed to someguy@mydomain.com.)
This form of catch-all is useful if you already have a domain and mail system defined, and you want Directra to handle email for your domain, while still ultimately routing email that Directra doesn't explicitly handle to the domain's original mail system and existing POP boxes. For example, let's say you already own the domain mydomain.com, and have various POP boxes set up at your ISP for your domain. In Directra, you'd like to define additional email addresses, possibly for tags or for new Group members whose mailboxes are hosted elsewhere. By setting things up so that Directra receives all of your domain's email (by changing your domain's MX records), it can process the new addresses, and then relay all other email to your domain's original mail server.
Configuring Directra and your own domain for this arrangement requires two changes. First, you modify your domain's MX records to point to Directra, so that all email for your domain is first sent to Directra. Second, you set your Group's catch-call address to be the name of your domain's original mail server. If your domain has more than one server, use the highest-priority server.
When creating Member Pages for members of your Group that already have email addresses (and POP boxes) in your domain, enter their existing email addresses as you would for any user. Since these addresses are not actually addresses that Directra is configured to route, Directra will automatically relay messages to the original mail server. For example, let's say that you own domain mydomain.com, and there is already a POP box at your ISP for the address chris@mydomain.com. When you set up Chris's Member Page, you would add the email address chris@mydomain.com, just as you would any other address owned by Chris. When Directra receives email for chris@mydomain.com, it will simply relay it to your ISP's mail server.
The first two items, above, are by far the most common ways to handle the catch-all address. But if your're a more advanced user, you have the following options.
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