Services/Mail
Mail Hosting
What we can offer:
- full hosting (MX1) on our servers:
- multiple email addresses which can be real mailboxes or mere redirections at another third party addresses
- based on milkypond.org (or maybe duckcorp.org) domain(s) or you own domain(s)
- fallback retention (MX2) on our servers or, at your choice, partner servers (currently via Hivane)
Full Hosting
Access Methods
You can retrieve your mails, in case of a real mailbox, using:
- IMAP+TLS (TCP 143) / IMAPS (TCP 993) on imap.duckcorp.org
- or POP3+TLS (TCP 110) / POP3S (TCP 995) on pop.duckcorp.org
- or one of the provided webmails
The IMAP protocol is recommended over POP3, as it provides many interresting features. If you want to download all your mails absolutely at home, loosing the ability to read your mail from anywhere on the planet, you can do that with IMAP too (look at your mail client settings).
You can use our servers to send mails out too via smtp.duckcorp.org using:
- SMTP+TLS (TCP 25) / SMTPS (TCP 465)
- and SASL authentication
Mail Filtering
With your favourite mail client, you can probably filter your mails in proper folders already. Nevertheless, this can be a annoying operation:
- blocking you mail client for a long time if you have to process plenty of mails
- downloading each mail information, and sometimes content (depending on your filters), is lenghty too, and cost much bandwidth
- syncing filters accross your machines (home desktop, laptop, office machine…) is a pain in the ass
- processing only when you're online prevents triggering actions in a timely manner (automatic redirect, vacation messages…), and running a machine 24/7 with a mail client polling new mails every 30s is not a solution
We provide a much better way to do this using the SIEVE filters. Shortly, SIEVE is a language dedicated to expressing mail filters. Our server is able to process your mails according to these filters as soon as they arrive. You then don't have to care about them anymore, and may use light mail clients or webmails when you're not on your machine with your favourite software. To push your filters on the server, a dedicated protocol exists:
- MANAGESIEVE (TCP 4190) on sieve.duckcorp.org
Several softwares support managing SIEVE rules:
- Icedove/Thunderbird using the SIEVE extension (in xul-ext-sieve Debian package) provides a rules editor
- Horde (Ingo) provides an easy to use web interface
- Squirrelmail with the Avelsieve extension provides an easy to use web interface
- Roundcube with an extension provides an easy to use web interface
- sieve-connect provides a CLI to upload/download/activate your rules files
(tell us if you know more software supporting this feature)
You can read more info about SIEVE here:
- supported SIEVE features on our server: http://pigeonhole.dovecot.org/
- http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/
- http://sieve.info/
You may need to share mails or messages with friends or people your do stuff with. Depending on your needs, two solutions are possible:
- share some of your own folders, thus called shared folders
- manage a special folder hierarchy, called public folders (even if they may not be accessible to everyone)
Through IMAP, or our webmails internally using IMAP, it is possible to partition the folder hierarchy into namespaces. Traditionally you are using the root namespace for your private folders. Additionnal namespaces can be created and will appear among your own folders or separate, depending on your mail client's choice of representation. To avoid name clashes, we decided to prefix all additionnal namespace names with a #.
Since 2011-05-14, the following extra namespaces are created and reserved:
- #Shared, containing all folders other users decided to share with you
- #MilkyPond, containing public MP/DC information mailboxes you may subscribe at will
Using IMAP, it is possible to setup rights (read only, write allowed…) to your own folders in order to share them with other users, or group of users. Public folders are owned by noone, and must be created by DC administrators ; if you need one, send us a request and we may be able to create it and delegate administration to your care (namespace name is subject to approval). Once created, public folders can be administered like shared folders.
Client mail softwares support:
- Horde: support namespaces, shared folders configurable via 'Options'->'Share Folders' menu but no ACLs for public folders
- Icedove/Thunderbird: support namespaces, shared and public folders configurable via folder selection and 'Tools' => 'Imap-ACL' menu action
Most other softwares have namespace support only, so you should be able to use shared/public folders you have rights on but not configure them yourself
Retention fallback
The current retention period on our servers is 2 weeks, but can be temporary or permanently increased if needed.
