- OpenACS 5.9

www/doc/index.adp

+
+<property name="context">{/doc/acs-mail-lite {Mail Services Lite}} {User Documentation for ACS Mail Lite}</property>
+<property name="doc(title)">User Documentation for ACS Mail Lite</property>
+<master>
+<h1>User Documentation for ACS Mail Lite</h1>
+
+Acs Mail Lite handles sending of email via sendmail or smtp and
+includes a bounce management system for invalid email accounts.
+<p>When called to send a mail, the mail will either get sent
+immediately or placed in an outgoing queue (changeable via
+parameter) which will be processed every few minutes.</p>
+<p>ACS Mail Lite uses either sendmail (you have to provide the
+location of the binary as a parameter) or SMTP to send the mail. If
+the sending fails, the mail will be placed in the outgoing queue
+again and be given another try a few minutes later when processing
+the queue again.</p>
+<p>Each email contains an X-Envelope-From adress constructed as
+follows:<br>
+The adress starts with "bounce" (can be changed by a parameter)
+followed by the user_id, a hashkey and the package_id of the
+package instance that sent the email, separated by "-". The domain
+name of this adress can be changed with a parameter.</p>
+<p>The system checks every 2 minutes (configurable) in a certain
+maildirectory (configurable) for newly bounced emails, so the
+mailsystem will have to place every mail to an address beginning
+with "bounce" (or whatever the appropriate parameter says) in that
+directory. The system then processes each of the bounced emails,
+strips out the message_id and verifies the hashkey in the
+bounce-address. After that the package-key of the package sending
+the original mail is found out by using the package_id provided in
+the bounce adress. With that, the system then tries to invoke a
+callback procedure via a service contract if one is registered for
+that particular package-key. This enables each package to deal with
+bouncing mails on their own - probably logging this in special
+tables. ACS Mail Lite then logs the event of a bounced mail of that
+user.</p>
+<p>Every day a procedure is run that checks if an email account has
+to be disabled from receiving any more mail. This is done the
+following way:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>If a user received his last mail X days ago without any further
+bounced mail then his bounce-record gets deleted since it can be
+assumed that his email account is working again and no longer
+refusing emails. This value can be changed with the parameter
+"MaxDaysToBounce".</li><li>If more then Y emails were returned by a particular user then
+his email account gets disabled from receiving any more mails from
+the system by setting the email_bouncing_p flag to t. This value
+can be changed with the parameter "MaxBounceCount".</li><li>To notify users that they will not receive any more mails and
+to tell them how to reenable the email account in the system again,
+a notification email gets sent every 7 days (configurable) up to 4
+times (configurable) that contains a link to reenable the email
+account.</li>
+</ul>
+
+To use this system here is a quick guide how to do it with postfix.
+<ul>
+<li>Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf
+<ul>
+<li>Set "recipient_delimiter" to " - "</li><li>Set "home_mailbox" to "Maildir/"</li><li>Make sure that /etc/postfix/aliases is hashed for the alias
+database</li>
+</ul>
+</li><li>Edit /etc/postfix/aliases. Redirect all mail to "bounce" (if
+you leave the parameter as it was) to "nsadmin" (in case you only
+run one server).</li>
+</ul>
+
+In case of multiple services on one system, create a bounce email
+for each of them (e.g. changeing "bounce" to "bounce_service1") and
+create a new user that runs the aolserver process for each of them.
+You do not want to have service1 deal with bounces for service2.
+<h2>Release Notes</h2>
+<p>Please file bugs in the <a href="http://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/">Bug Tracker</a>.</p>