Email forwarding and autoresponders

All accounts with Open Veld have e-mail features.  In any case, you must first have your own Internet Service Provider or content provider (e.g., AOL) or networked connection to get onto the internet.  But once you are on the Internet, you do not have to use your AOL mail account or ISP to receive or send mail.  Your hosted domain mydomain.com gives you permanent addresses which you can use for sending and receiving.  You can make up your own domain addresses such as jorge@mydomain.com, reservations@mydomain.com, and webmaster@mydomain.com, and you can assign these to anyone you want to associate with your account, such as a business partners, secretaries, board members, etc., etc.
For the UniWeb parking plan, only e-mail forwarding is provided.  But this will normally be transparent to most correspondents, because you can use your domain address as the reply address, thus your correspondents would have to open up the e-mail source to see the the headers pointing back to your ISP.  Other plans (Personal and higher) allow for multiple options of e-mail forwarding, autoresponders, and POP (incoming) and SMTP (outgoing) mail services.

Forwarding
By default, all mail to anybody@yourdomain.com is set to forward to the e-mail address that was provided when your account was set up.  This e-mail address is called the "default" mail forwarding address and can be changed in E-mail Settings within your Control Panel.  If you want all e-mail to your domain to go to the "default" address, and it is the address you want to use, you don't need to configure anything.
You can also set up a number (6 or more, depending on the plan) of specific mail forwarding options for e-mail addresses which are to be forwarded to a specific address other than the default.  You can easily do this from E-mail Settings within your Control Panel.  For example, if John Henry is your President, and Mary Wu is your Chief Executive Officer, you might want to set up:
president@yourcompany.com forwards to JHenry@aol.com
ChiefExec@yourcompany.com forwards to mwu@speedyISP.net
Each forwarding must be to one and only one address.

Autoresponders
If you would like to have a standard reply sent automatically in response to e-mails received by a specific domain address, you need to set up an "autoresponder."  This involves writing a text file you specify.

1. Write your message in a plain text file using Notepad or other ASCII editor.  Give it a name like formletter.txt and upload it to a convenient location in your domain in ASCII mode with FTP.
2. Use your Web browser to surf to E-mail Settings in your Control Panel and under 'Autoresponders' enter the e-mail address at your domain which is intended to invoke the autoresponder.  For example, if you want an autoresponse message sent to anyone who sends an e-mail to "sales@yourcompany.com", you would enter "sales".  When a user sends an e-mail message to this address the autoresponder will automatically reply with the formletter.txt message you specify.
3. Under the "File to send" heading, enter the location of the text file such as formletter.txt  Be sure to enter the complete path to the file relative to your home directory (example: /_private/autorep/formletter.txt).  Make sure the file name and path have only lower case letters.
4. Under the "Reply to" heading, enter the e-mail address from which you want to have your autoresponse message appear to be coming.  This address will appear in the 'From:' heading in the autoresponse e-mail.  If the user replies to the autoresponse message, the reply will be sent to this e-mail address.  This should not be the same as the original address sales@yourcompany.com or else there is a small possibility that someone else using an autoresponder will write to you, and cause a chain reaction of autoreponses between the two servers.
5. Under the "Who to Notify" heading, enter the e-mail address of someone you want to have receive a copy of the original incoming e-mail message that invoked the autoresponder.  The incoming e-mail message will be forwarded to this address and your automated response will be sent back to the sender. If you leave this field blank, the incoming e-mail message will be discarded.
6. Most e-mail messages you receive have the following header information: (To: From: Subject:). To specify a subject, you can simply add a line at the top of the autoresponder message text file (step 1) that reads:

       Subject: Information about our services

You would replace 'Information about our services' with whatever subject you want to have for the autoresponse e-mail.