Mail Routing

Routing allows you to override the default SMTP system of sending messages. You may need create routing entries if you:

use a relay host : a mail server that will look up addresses and send outgoing mail along to its destination. You might do this to reduce the load on the server, or because you are behind a firewall and cannot send messages directly.
send many messages to a particular country, and you have access to mail server there which is more efficient at sending messages in that area.
send many messages to remote or international mail servers that do not respond quickly and may need a long timeout value.
have a server that is not always connected to the Internet.
need to change settings for a specific mail host, such as timeout or ETRN.

In most cases, you do not need to set up any additional routing.

All messages to hosts and domains which do not have entries in this routing table will use the normal DNS and SMTP system.

Editing the Routing Entries

If you want an SMTP server to relay messages, contact the mail administrator and make arrangements before creating a routing entry.

Use the WebSTAR Admin Mail Settings Routing page to edit the routing entries.

Routing Wildcards

You can use a wildcard (*) for part of the host name or IP addresses, or the following regular expression items:

* matches 0 or more characters.
? matches any single character
[...] matches any single character in the set
[^...] matches any single character not in the set
] can be the first character in the set
x-y is the range of characters from x to y
x is a specific character
- can be used as a specific character at the start or end of the list of characters and ranges
\ matches the following character, disregarding special characters

Examples:

 

	*.domain.com

 
	mail[123].example.org

 
	post[a-z].domain.za

 
	mail?.*.example.com

The first matching entry will be used for routing.

Domain

Enter the domain name, host name, or IP address for this entry. All messages going to matching hosts will be processed according to the settings in this entry.

Route

The host and domain name of the destination SMTP server, or one which will relay messages from your server to their destinations.

Routing Options

Timeout (Seconds)

This field specifies how long to wait for the relay server to respond before dropping the connection and trying again later. This may happen when the network between you and the relay server is overloaded, the relay server goes down, or there is another problem.

The default is 0 , meaning that this entry should use the value from the SMTP Connections Timeout , and the range is from 0 to 100 seconds.

Retry Interval (Minutes)

This field specifies how often to try contacting the destination or delay server.

The default is 0 , meaning the default internal value of four hours (240 minutes), and the range is from 0 to 999 minutes.

Expire After (Hours)

This field specifies how long to keep trying to contact the relay server before returning the message to the sender.

The default is 0 , meaning that the value from the SMTP Connections Hold Undeliverable Mail and the range is from 0 to 100.

Enable SMTP ETRN Command

If your computer is only intermittently connected to the Internet (or another TCP/IP network), you can still run a mail server. You must work with the network administrator or ISP to make sure that their mail server can hold your incoming messages for you when you are not connected, and respond to the ETRN command when WebSTAR Mail has reconnected and is ready to receive these messages. Not all ISPs will provide these services. If so, that server will be your remote host, storing incoming messages until your server connects. WebSTAR Mail server will also store (queue) the outgoing messages and send them whenever your machine connects to the TCP/IP network.