Administration of a D2S Gateway Server

Enterprise Edition  >  SMTP Gateway Server  >  Administration

Accessing the Admin Module

Logging on as Administrator

Death2Spam ships with a built-in administrator account, having a logon ID of admin@localhost. The default password for this user is "admin", which should be changed as soon as you log onto the D2S Admin Module's web interface.

User Accounts Management

There are a few things to consider in order to make the most of your D2S licenses. The goal with user account management is to perform all administrative tasks through your server's Admin Module's web screens, and not have to configure Death2Spam's user management files at all. In some circumstances, however, this may not be possible.

Configuring your mail server to manage users for D2S

Death2Spam normally creates a new user account when it first processes an email for that user. This works well, except when D2S receives a message for an invalid user. In this case, Death2Spam will expect your mail server to return an appropriate error code (generally an SMTP 550 error) when it receives the message. To deal with this scenario, Death2Spam only creates the user account after it successfully passes the message to your mail server.

Configuring D2S to use Access Control Lists

In some cases, your system administrator might want to collect all email sent to your organization, regardless of whether or not it's sent to a valid address. In this case, D2S will not know be able to correctly detect whether or not an email for a new user is for a valid user, or an error. As a result, Death2Spam will not be able to accurately create new accounts on the fly.

To deal with this situation, you can provide D2S with an access control list which identifies valid users in the system:

1. Create a text file called accounts.
2. List all your valid email accounts in this file, one account per line. The account name should be the full email address, not just the local user name.
3. If it does not already exist, create a directory called access in the main D2S directory (i.e. the directory which contains the "bin", "lib", "data", etc directories).
4. Place the accounts file in this directory.

D2S will now use this file to identify valid email accounts in the Death2Spam system. D2S accounts will only be created for these users. All messages to other accounts will simply pass directly through the system, to be handled by your mail server.

Alias Configuration

If your mail server supports aliases, you may wish to support this behaviour in the Death2Spam server. Aliases are particularly useful if you wish to minimise the use of your licenses, because D2S is licensed on a per email account basis. An alias is not considered to be an email account, but a part of another email account.

When an alias is created, all email for that alias is processed on the Death2Spam server as if it were for the account which the alias refers to. However, when it comes to delivering the message to your server, the message is sent as normal, that is, it is sent to the alias address, not to the "real" address. This means that the messages sent to the "real" user will still be correctly addressed to the alias, but when the user wishes to re-classify email, they will see all mail sent to them, regardless of whether or not it was sent to one of their aliases. This means the user only requires a single web logon, to review and classify messages for all of their aliases.

Example alias file entries:

freds_alias@yourdomain.com     fred@yourdomain.com
another_alias@yourdomain.com   fred@yourdomain.com
nellie2@yourdomain.com         nellie@yourdomain.com

To create an alias file:

1. Create a text files called aliases.
2. List all your aliases in this file, along with the address the alias refers to. There should be one line per alias, with the alias listed first, followed by white-space (space or tab), and then the "real" account -- see example above.
3. If it does not already exist, create a directory called access in the main D2S directory (i.e. the directory which contains "bin", "lib", "data", etc directories).
4. Place the aliases file in this directory.

Configuring the default D2S email account

For each domain in your organisation, you can configure a default email address for that domain by creating a wildcard alias. Wildcard aliases are used to direct all email which matches a wildcard pattern to a particular email address.

To create a wildcard alias, create an alias file as described above in the section "Alias files". Create a new entry, specifying the alias as "*@yourdomain.com", replacing "yourdomain.com" with your domain name. The "*" character is the wildcard.

When wildcard aliases are used, an email is processed as follows:

1. The system first attempts to find an account in the accounts file (see "Configuring your mail server to use D2S Access Control Lists"). If it finds an account, it processes the email for this account and then forwards it to your mail server.
2. If it fails to find an account in the accounts file, it looks for a matching non-wildcard alias in the alias file. If it finds an alias, it processes the email as if it were the account corresponding to the alias, and then forwards it to that alias address at your mail server.
3. If it fails to find a non-wildcard alias, it looks for a matching wildcard alias in the alias file. If it finds such an alias, it processes the email as in step 2 above.

It's a good idea to make the wildcard alias refer to a special email address such as postmaster@yourdomain.com, so that your administrator's D2S account is separated from the wildcard account.