Email Transport

While working in a team, an important issue is how to use e-mail in a team. The simplest way is to configure all Outlook with the mail server at a given provider, all emails are now routed to the internet and received from the internet -- provided a permanent connection to the internet is given. However emails this way is transported with a delay of about 5 until 15 minutes, because clients are usually not allowed to use a public POP3/SMTP server more frequently. Also if you pay your internet connection either by minutes or transferred bytes, each connection to public mail server will produce costs.

OLfolders comes with a built in mail proxy, the mail proxy works the same way as your provider, it provides you with a local SMTP and POP3 server, clients can send and receive emails from your local OLfolders server each minute, while the OLfolders server sends and receives emails for example every 15 minutes. Internal emails are transmitted immediately even if no internet connection is established.

The mail proxy performs the following tasks:

• Administration of internal email accounts
• Receiving external emails from the internet
• Sending external emails to the internet
• Filtering emails (for example sorting out viruses and spam)
• Forwarding emails, for example to a user which is out of office
• Answering emails (out of offices assistant).
• Clients normally connect to the mail proxy by POP3/SMTP or connect to a folder which is configured for server side sending and receiving.

Starting the mail server

The mail server will be disabled, until you configure it properly. You do this in options/general:

You need to re-start OLfolders server in order to start the service. If the service is not started, OLfolders is able to receive emails but is not able to act as a mail server. In some cases, you might want not to start the POP3/SMTP service, for example if you are running a different mail server at the same computer.

After installation of OLfolders, the mail server is disabled. A click on "Enable mail server" enables the mail server and displays some more property pages. Next we must start the mail proxy and evenutally adjust the ports. In may cases, the Microsoft SMTP server is installed on port 25, either we disable it or set a different port.

Adding a user accont

For each user, we need a user account. Any given account in OLfolders -- provided it has an email address -- is a valid user for email transport. We can configure Outlook or any other mail client to send/receive emails with this account.

In Outlook, we enter the same data as we entered in the user account and specify which server we use. The server is the computer on which the OLfolders server is installed and running as mail proxy. In order to send, we need "My server requires authentification".

Important: In order to be able to send, you must provide authentication, you can find this under More Settings, in some Outlook versions, it is called Advanced:

Connection to the internet

Generally, we recommend connecting to the internet using a router and a firewall for security reasons. If you do not use a router but use a dial in application, OLfolders is able to dial in and hang up the line for transfering emails. OLfolders discovers if it is online and dials only while offline. If you do not have a flatrate, remember to select disconnect, otherwise OLfolders keeps the line opened.

Also you can specify the days and hours on which OLfolders is connecting to the internet by pressing the button "Days/Hours":

Receiving external emails

In contrast to mail clients, such as Outlook, sending and receiving is configured differently. On receiving emails, OLfolders supports two modi:

• Delivery via name
• All mails arriving at a given acocunt are delivered to a certain user.
• Delivery via email address
• Each mail from an account is examined by its email recipient email addresses, if one of them matches any given email in any user account, the mail is delivered to that user.
• Using delivery via email address, only one email account is necessary to receive emails for various users, for example all emails can be retrieved using the postmasters account for a given domain.

Besides the fields used to connect to the providers server (server name, user name, password and so on) the form contains additional fields:

• E-Mail-Account
  Display name of this entry, this entry is displayed in the previous dialog.
• Distribute via email address
  If this button is selected, all arriving emails are distributed by the email address contained in any arriving email, if this button is not selected, all emails are distributed to the postmaster of this account.
• Enable account
  Allows to enable or disable this account. If disable, no emails are retrived.
• Postmaster
  Name of the OLfolders user which receives either all emails or emails which can not be distributed to other users.
• Distribution of Emails
  Each arriving email passes some steps before it is distributed to any user:
  • If the mail filter is active, it checks the email, for example if it contains a virus, the email will be distributed to the virus mailbox, if it is spam, it will be deliverd to the spam mailbox.
  • If an email forwarding for this email is active, the email is sent to the new address
    If the account is set to "distribute via email", each user is checked if one of its email addresses matches any given recipient in the email.
  • Otherwise, the email is distributed to the postmaster of the email account.
    If PST transport is enabled for any of the recipients of the email, the email is stored in a personal folder at the server.
• Sending external emails
  OLfolders is able to send emails without any external SMTP account, usually such emails will not arrive all recipients if you have a dynamic IP address and the recipient is using a blacklist to find out if your IP address is a dynamic one.

Usually, it is better to configure one external SMTP account in order to use it to send all outgoing mails. Note that the sender email address is stored in the email text, recipients of emails do not discover that the email is sent through an SMTP which not necessarily belongs to the POP3 account. The SMTP server at the provider is configured here:

Deliver to PST files

Normally, a client receives emails from the server using POP3. OLfolders 2.1 allows receiving emails at the server, any arriving email is imediatly stored in a given personal folders file in a given profile. Clients connect via OLfolders to that file and see any arriving emails without having using an email account. Delivery to PST files has the following advantages:

• The server is storing emails in the moment they are received, if a client logs on to the folder, all emails are already received.
• More than one user can share the same email account.
• A user can log on from any computer to his/her personal email account using an Outlook or Windows profile.
• The server is able to deliver to folders other then Inbox.
• Before configuring the PST transport in OLfolders, in Outlook a profile and a data file for each user which is receiving directly from the server.