Configuring Your Gateman Email Server
Your Gateman Lifestyle Server includes an Email Server that provides users access to email via an email client and via your web browser using your laptop and mobile phone.Gateman Email Server Basics
Within your Gateman Email Server configuration there are a few key topics that require explanation and discussion. These include:
Receiving Email from the Internet
Sending Email to the Internet
Email Domains
Email Settings for Blacklists and Filtering
Email Users
Receiving Email from the Internet
Gateman’s email server can receive email using 3 different methods:
1. Directly from the internet – For this you will need to have a static IP address and Domain name. Gateman’s SMTP server can then receive email directly for the domain.
2. From a catch-all email account held on a website on the internet – Gateman can then ‘log-in’ to this account and ‘POP’ off the email from this server and distribute it to the appropriate Gateman users. An example of this is when you have a domain name ‘mybusiness.com’ and an Internet service provider hosts email for your domain.
3. From a single user’s email account held at a website on the internet – Gateman then ‘logs-in’ to the individual account and ‘POPs’ the email for this user into an individual user’s inbox within Gateman. An example of this is when you have an email user ‘[email protected]’ on the domain ‘telstra.com.au’ and you wish to get the mail for this user into the inbox of a nominated user within Gateman.
Methods 1 and 2 are popular methods of getting email within a business. Method 3 is more for
home users and should not be attempted with a large number of individual user accounts.
Sending Email to the Internet
Gateman’s email server can send email to the internet using 2 different methods:
1. Directly using its SMTP server – When this method is selected, email is sent directly from Gateman’s SMTP server to the domain where the email is destined towards; there is no other server in-between. Using this method, emails sent from your system could be rejected or
be received as spam if
a. Your static IP address is provided by an ISP and your recipient has configured a
DNS Blacklist Server that blacklists IP addresses given by an ISP.
b. The IP address assigned to your Gateman server does not have a reverse DNS
address from which your mail is originating and the domain name supplied does not match with the domain you are sending email for.
2. Relayed via an ISP’s SMTP server – When this method is selected, the email is first sent to the account that is configured within Gateman, and relayed from there to the final recipient. This almost always guarantees that the email will be received by the recipient. However it
may still be flagged as spam, depending on the type of spam filter being used by the recipient’s system and the contents of your email.
Email Domains
Your Gateman Server can be configured to receive email for multiple domains. Any emails being received must be destined for one of the domains that are configured within Gateman, else the email is rejected. Each domain can receive email only for the domain it is configured for.
Email Settings for Blacklists and Filtering
Your Gateman Server has a number of settings to prevent spam together with stopping legitimate email from being flagged as spam. It also has mechanisms for auditing all email coming into and
going out of the server, tracking and making copies of outgoing mail to safeguard your Intellectual Property and backing up your email.
Email Users
Once your email settings are configured, you may configure email user’s within your Gateman System. The maximum number of users that may be configured is determined by your license. In
the event that you exceed the number of users, your Gateman email module will be blocked. Information on the number of users that are licensed, configured and the status of the Gateman Email module can be viewed from the ‘Dashboard’ screen accessed from the ‘Administration -> Dashboard’ menu.
Email Server Configuration
To configure your Gateman Email Server, log in to your Gateman Client as an Administrator and go to the ‘Administration -> MailServer’ menu. You will be provided with a window with buttons on the LHS providing various configuration options.
Configuring Email Accounts
This screen allows you to configure the Incoming and Outgoing Email accounts and the Email
Domains used within your Gateman system. To open the Email Accounts configuration screen,
Local Gateman SMTP Account
This account is available by default with your Gateman Server and is used to receive emails directly from the internet. To use this account to receive email, the administrator must configure the
domains that emails will be received for. In the event there is more than one domain, separate each domain using a comma (e.g. mygateman.com.au,mybusiness.com).
Fig: Local SMTP Account
This table displays configured email accounts. The ‘receive’ row with the _null login displays the
settings for the email received by this Gateman server directly via SMTP (local account).
This server name is the same as the ‘Hostname’ configured in the Network Settings page. No login or password info is required for this local account.
Configure the domains for which email will be received directly by this Gateman server
This checkbox is of no relevance for this ‘local’ account. ‘null’ indicates emails
External Incoming Catch-All Email Accounts
To configure external email accounts, one needs to click on the ‘New’ button and work through the Wizard screens.
Fig: Step 1 – Select Send or Receive
Fig: Step 2 – Enter information for authentication Select the ‘Receive’
radio button for an External incoming mail account.
Fig: Step 3 – Configure domain and misc info
Once the account is created, it can be modified directly by selecting the required row from the table, and modifying the details from the fields below.
Fig: Modify Remote Account
This row indicates an account that is received by an external provider on the Internet, and then POPed off the remote server by Gateman using the authentication details displayed below.
Configure the domains for which email will be received for this ‘Remote’ account.
Check this box to indicate the mail once read must be deleted from the remote server This server name, login name and password
are required to access the email from the account and are the same that are configured within your email client (e.g. outlook) when it accesses the remote account
‘null’ indicates emails from this account are distributed based on the User name.
Catch-all account Domain name for which
email is received
Select ‘Common’ for Catch-All accounts
Check the box to delete mails that are read from the
External SMTP Relay Account
Your Gateman system comes with its own SMTP server that is used to send email to users on the internet. However as discussed earlier, based on the type of IP address your Gateman mail server is attached to, the sent mail may be flagged as spam or rejected. The local SMTP account is not displayed and is always available; it has a Priority of 5. Mails are using the account having the highest priority (0 is the highest and 10 the lowest), and in the event of a failure of the account, the one using the next highest priority.
In order to configure an external SMTP Relay account, click the ‘New’ button and work through the wizard screens.
Fig: Select the type of account
Fig: Step 2 – Enter information for authentication Select the ‘Send’ radio
button for an external SMTP Relay account.
This server name, login name and password are required to login to the account to relay the emails, and are the same that are configured within your email client (e.g. outlook) when it sends emails using the remote account
Once the account is created, it can be modified directly by selecting the required row from the table, and modifying the details from the fields below.
Fig: Relay Email Using a ‘Send’ Account
Deleting an Email Domain
In the event an email domain is no longer required, then one can remove the domain entries from the account entry or delete the account entry. Thereafter one can cleanup the domain from the ‘Administration -> Housekeeping -> Cleanup’ menu.
DNS Blacklist Server
To configure a DNS Blacklist server, click the DNSBL servers button. There are a variety of DNS Blacklist servers available on the internet, some of which are paid services if used commercially. The Spamhaus project is often used provide blacklist services to small to medium sized business with less than 300,000 DNS queries per day. Other DNSBL services are available on the internet.
This row indicates an account that is used to Relay email to be sent to the internet. The authentication settings for the account are displayed below. Mail for all domains is sent using this account.
The priority determines the order in which the accounts will be used to send email. 1 is the highest priority and 10 the lowest. A local SMTP account (not visible in the table above) used for sending emails, has a priority of 5 and will be used to send emails if this account fails.
Blacklist and Whitelist Configuration
A variety of settings are available for identifying IP Addresses, Domains and email addresses, from which emails are received. Click on the required button to modify the existing settings.
Valid Recipient Domains and Addresses
Your Gateman Server allows you to restrict where emails can be sent to. You can configure the set of valid Recipient Domains by clicking on the ‘Recipient domains’ button, and the set of valid Recipient Addresses by clicking on the ‘Recipient addresses’ button. You may then configure selected users to be restricted to sending emails only to the selected email addresses.
Email Aliases
Often one may require generic email addresses redirected to one or more persons. This is typical in business that require addresses such as sales, info, support and such other email addresses to be redirected. This may be configured by clicking on the ‘Alias settings’ button as shown in the following screen.
Configure Spam Settings
Click the ‘Spam settings’ button to modify these settings. Gateman uses ‘Spam Assassin’ to battle spam.
Enter the Alias Name here, one or more email recipients (comma separated), then click the ‘Add’ button.
Lists the existing alias addresses. To modify an address, select the required row and delete it, then add a new entry.
Specify the score above which email is moved to the ‘Junk’ folder.
Specify the max size of email to be tested for spam (spammers send small emails)
Specify the time to spend checking the email.
Check to perform checks using the internet.
Configure Misc Email Settings
These settings can be accessed by clicking the ‘Miscellaneous’ button. If you have 10 email users connecting via IMAP you may require 3 threads. Increase the number of threads on a pro-rata basis.
Configuring Email Users
After configuration of your Gateman Email Server and other Gateman modules (e.g. Devices, Access Control and Attendance, File and Http Proxy Server), you need to define the users and assign them to various groups. This is done from within the ‘Administration -> Users’ menu. Please refer to the relevant document for additional details.
For each configured user, the administrator may configure:
Whether the user has access to Gateman’s Email Server
The name by which email will be addressed to this user by
The max size (in megabytes) of all mail boxes within all domains for this user.
Whether this user is a postmaster. A postmaster will receive all unaddressed email, as well as be sent copies of emails sent by ‘Logged Email’ users.
Whether to ‘Log’ this user’s Sent mail
Whether to restrict where this user sends email to. If restricted, this user may send email to only those email domains and addresses defined in the ‘Recipient Domains’ and ‘Recipient Addresses’ settings.
Check to enable
Gateman’s email server Select the interfaces on which
to start the email server Wait minutes between
external mail fetches
Max message recipients
Max number of threads opened on the corresponding port waiting to receive connections simultaneously.
The following screen shows the ‘Email Server’ user-based settings
Virus Scanner
Your Gateman Server includes the widely used ‘ClamAV’ based engine for Virus Scanning. This virus database is updated automatically on a daily basis from the internet. Changes to the virus scanning engine are also periodically made by the developers. These changes are compiled at our lab and uploaded to our web server from which your Gateman server is automatically updated.
Configuring Global Email Filters
Every user may access Gateman’s Email Server via an IMAP Email Client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) or using Gateman’s Web Browser interface. Within the web browser interface, the Email menu provides a ‘Mail Filters’ menu option through which they may configure filters on incoming email. Your Gateman Server has a special reserved ‘admin’ user. Any filters that are
configured against this ‘admin’ user, get applied to all other users (provided the mail boxes [if relevant to the filter] are defined within the user’s setup.
Check to allow the user access to the Gateman’s Email Server
Enter the email name that mail will be
addressed to this user by (exclude the domain)
Set the max size of the box (in megabytes) used to hold all email (in all domains) for this user
Check to make the user the postmaster
