- Your domain name (e.g. net-shopper.co.uk).
- The name of an intelligent gateway to send onbound mail to (e.g. post.demon.co.uk). This must not be the name of this machine!
- The names of all the users who will be using the mail system (if you are not using the NT User Database).
1.1.1 Service Parameters
Each of the services supports the following switches or parameters:- -d Display the computer's name. This name is used by the key software and will be required when you register your software.
- -k key Set the program key. The program will read the key you have provided, decode and check it. If the key is validated it will be written to the registry. Do not attempt to write the key directly to the registry without checking it.
- -h Lists all the parameters available to the service.
- -i Install the service. This will add the service to the service manager and create default entries in the Registry if they do not already exist. If you already have version 2.00 or later, the entries will automatically be updated.
- -r Display registration details for NT Mail.
- -s Display installed status of the software. This will cause the program to read the key and indicate what is allowed.
- -u Uninstall the service from the service manager.
- -v Display this version of software.
1.1.2 Adding users Manually
To manually add new users to your mail server you will need to add a registry entry for each mail box and update a counter so that the mail software knows how many users there are.Start REGEDT32 and select "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE". Select Software, InternetShopper and Mail. Here you will see a set of entries that have already be installed. You can see an entry for "M0" (Mail user 0) which has the following string:
Once you have entered all your users, you need to specify how many users you have on the system. This stage is necessary so that the automatic configuration routines run smoothly and will save you having to have contiguous mail box numbers. Select the entry called "Version" and change the last digit to the number of users. In this case Version would become:
1.1.3 Adding users with LOADMAIL
This is a program that has been written to allow you to quickly update the registry entries. All you need to do is prepare a script of users, passwords and mailboxes and this program will do the rest. LOADMAIL has only one parameter - the name of the script file. LOADMAIL will read through the script adding entries to the registry after carrying out a few checks. The script will have the a line for each mailbox with the white-space seperated parameters: mailbox name, user name, password, aliases. There will always be atleat one alias (otherwise the user will never get any mail). A typical script file might look like:LOADMAIL carries out some checking on the information in the script, so you may see one of the following messages:
- No aliases defined in line x Check that all the parameters are seperated by a white space (a white space is either one or more SPACE or TABS).
- Mailbox name is too long in line x Mail box names may only be 8 characters long. This is so they fit onto a FAT file system as well as NTFS.
- Mailbox name may not start with AA in line x No mailbox may start with "AA". This is because the mail software uses these mail boxes for out going mail rather than local mail.
- Repeated alias $ in line x You cannot have the same alias for more than one mailbox (or in the same mailbox).
- Mailbox has illegal characters in line x A mail box name may only be made up of characters and digits.
If the "password" field is replaced
by a dash, the POP service will check the password in the NT User Database.
If both username and password are a dash, this is treated as an alias.
1.1.4 Setting other parameters and your message
There are two other parameters you have to set up to get a
complete and working mail system. These are you domain name
and your intelligent post daemoon. If you have never used
the registry, now is going to be your first time! There is
a page about REGEDT32 to give you
a quick over view on how REGEDT32 works.
Changing the intelligent gateway
Start REGEDT32 and select "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE". Select Software, InternetShopper and Mail. Now double click on the entry called PostData. Edit the first parameter and place your gateway name after the first colon. The default is "*:post.demon.co.uk" but they will not be pleased if the whole world uses their machine! The "*" tells NTMAIL to attempt to send the mail to the destination machine first, if this fails then send it on to another gateway. More than one gateway may be defined.Changing the domain name
Double click on the entry called SmtpData. Change the first parameter from "net-shopper.co.uk" to your domain name. If you fail to do this, the mail system will assume you are "net-shopper.co.uk" and return all incoming mail messages.
You can also change the message that is added to all your
out going mail. Find the string "I love my NT computer" and
change the portion in quotes to your message - you only have
60 characters so keep it snappy! If you don't want a message
replace the message with a dash and none will be added.
SMTP will automatically upgrade the registry for the new version
of the software.
If the password starts with "-" the POP service will assume that there
is a plain-text password that must be encrypted. It wil encrypt the
password and write it back into the registry with a preceeding
asterisk. From this point on, the encrypted password in the registry
will be used. If you change the encrypted text, the user will fail
the password check and you will have to enter a new password with a
preceeding "-". For example the password "-brian" is encrypted to a string like
"*JFHISHkdhf" and only the password "brian" will match this encrypted
password in future.
Our completed registry entry will look like this:
Here we will set a list that can be joined by anyone and allow
anyone to send mail to it. The list manager will be the root
user and we will display three different messages when people
request help about this list, first join the list and leave
the list. In addition we will have a message displayed in every
piece of mail sent by the list server, telling people how
to leave and containing a special, unique character sequence
so that intelligent mail clients can automatically file mail
sent.
The three files will typically answer the following questions:
For this set of requirements we have an alias of "DISCUSSION" - the
list name. The parameters part has the following entries:
What you will need to do:
1.2 Installation over a previous version
To install NT MAIL over version 2.00 and later, simply stop the
services, copy the new executables over the old ones (saving the old
executables and the original registry entries using REGEDT32), enter "smtp -i" and
start the services again.1.3 Starting the service
Once you have set up all the parameters (users, passwords
etc) you will need to start the services. Do this using the
Services section in the Control Pannel. You will find
three new entries, "SMTP Server", "POST server" and "POP Server".
If you want the services to automatically start when the system is
next run, now is the time to do it.
1.4 Changing values
If you change any values once a service is running, you
must remember to stop the service and re-start it.
1.5 Installing over a previous version
Unfortunately none of the configuration from version 1.00 can
be saved. This situation will not arrise again since all new
versions will update registry values automatically.
You will need to take the following steps:
2. Registry entries
This section lists all the registry entries in great detail. In
general you can ignore this - but it is here for completeness.
There are a lot of warnings about incorrect values here - checking will
be the GUI rather than
each service. This will keep the amount of code in each
service down to a minimum. Remember that your will need to stop
and start the service for any changes to take effect.
2.1 ConCurrent
This entry defines the number of threads that are allowed for
each of the three servers. In order
the parameters are:
2.2 Key
This is a twelve character string which allows the software
to work. You are advised not to change it directly but to use
the "-k" option on any of the services. This way the key will
be checked before the registry is changed. If you suspect a
problem with the key, check the mail log file.
2.3 Log
Four numbers followed by the directory for log files. The numbers are
binary options for different logging levels. In order the entries are:
The "numbers" for the log details are not consistent since other
bits are used for other log information, for example DBUEG log
which can quickly fill a 1Gb hard disk.
2.4 M0....Mx
The definitions of mailboxes on the system - either set up
manually or by the LOADMAIL script. Each mail box has its
own line in the registry, the line has the format:
As the software is written
other letters will be used for other facilities.
2.5 MailDir
This is the directory that will store all the mail boxes and
out bound mail. Note the directory MUST exist and msut be
terminated by a back-slash. For example C:\mail is invalid,
C:\mail\ will work.
2.6 PostData
The following parameters are defined:
2.7 SmtpData
This value should have the following entries seperate by a white space:
2.8 Version
Two digits for the version number and the maximum number of
mailboxes that have ever been defined. The version number is used
by the configuration software when updating the registry from old
version of the software.
2.9 MailNumber
This is the number of the last message sent out bound by SMTP. It will increment
as the mail is sent and will tell you exactly how many messages have been sent
by NTMAIL.
3. List Server Configuration
There are two users that need to be set up for the list server. These
are the "list manager" and the "list" itself. In this part of
the documentation we will create a list that can be joined and mail
to by anyone.
3.1 Example: Global List
To complete a list specification, you will need four text files and
two entries in the registry. The first entry in the registry will
define the "list manager". This list manager will be used by the
two other examples described later. It is the list manager that
will analyse mail messages sent by users asking to leave a list,
join a list and get help about a list. The list manager has a help file
too.
The List Manager
The list manager has two parameters. The email name of the person
to contact in case of problems and the name of the help file that will
be sent to any user who requests it. The alias of the list manager is the
name of the list manager - we will be unimaginative and use "list".
This help file will also be
sent if a user sends a command the List Manager cannot understand. A typical
help file might look like this:
The List Definition
The list definition contains all the details about a particular
list and all the email addresses of every member of the list.
Combining this into one registry entry, we would have:
4. Removing NT MAIL
Stop the services and run each service with the "-u" flag. Use
REGEDT32 to remove the key "InternetShopper".
5. Using NTMAIL with diapup links
We are currently testing this functioinality to verify that it
works in all situations. If you have problems, please let us
know.
6. Configuration of Eudora
To use Eudora with NTMAil you will need to make the following
settings in the Configuration Dialog (under the menu Special).
The obvious fields have been ignored.
Eudora may be found at
ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/ibmpc/winsock/apps/eudor144.exe as well as
may other ftp sites.
