TECH TIP:
Using E-Mail Forwarding & Autoresponders

E-mail forwarding (also known as e-mail redirection) is a convenient way to receive e-mail addressed to multiple addresses without having to create and monitor multiple POP3 e-mail accounts. For example, common redirects are webmaster@mydomain.com, sales@mydomain.com, support@mydomain.com, info@mydomain.com, etc. Using your control panel's E-mail Forwarding option, you could create redirects for these and other addresses, and have all the mail sent to the addresses delivered to up to 4 POP3 accounts of your choice. This is an easy way to distribute e-mail to several members of your organization and avoids the hassle of creating and monitoring multiple accounts in your favorite e-mail client. The use of e-mail forwarding also provides a workaround to several limitations inherent in our POP3/SMTP configuration.

Autoresponders (or infobots) provide a method of automatically e-mailing information in reply to an e-mail. For example, you could create a price list that would be automatically e-mailed to anyone sending a blank e-mail to pricelist@mydomain.com. Using an autoresponder in combination with a redirect and/or subscribable maillist would allow you to capture the e-mail address of the person requesting the information for later marketing activities. You could even use a CGIEmail form in combination with an autoresponder and a redirect to capture more detailed information about the requestor.

E-mail forwarding and autoresponders can offer a great deal of power and flexibility when configured correctly. However, an incorrect configuration can result in problems which may adversely affect all mail delivery associated with your account. We strongly recommend that you review the detailed instructions available in our hosting manual before using these features.

The most common configuration errors that we encounter include:

• Incorrect "default" redirect
  The first entry in your e-mail forward list should be "default" followed by your primary account login (e.g., mydomain@mydomain.com).
• Incorrect naming
  Redirects and autoresponders must not share the same name as a POP3 user or a maillist.