Mail Server Service

The Mail Server service is an implementation of the SendMail daemon and POP 2 and POP 3 protocols, for Windows NT Workstation and Windows NT Server. The Mail Server installation program adds Mail Server and the supporting services to the Service Controller and starts Mail Server. Mail Server supports Internet-based mail clients, and is completely separate from the MS-Mail program.

Caution

Mail Server only supports the cleartext password authentication of POP 3. It does not support the APOP command. Since the user's password travels over the network in the clear, administrators should use caution when installing a mail system such as this.

Because Mail Server is integrated with the local account database, an account must be created (via User Manager) for each user who is to receive mail at the computer where Mail Server is running. Mail Server automatically creates a mail folder for a user when mail is received for that user or when the user connects via POP.

The intermediate files required by Mail Server, and the mailboxes, are all spooled on the Windows NT server. They can then be accessed through PD or through commercial clients such as Eudoraä™ from Qualcomm.

Mail Server includes the following services:

• • MtpSrv, which handles receiving SMTP mail
• • Pop3Srv, which handles POP clients
• • LocalMail, which handles delivery of local mail
• • PasswdSrv, which handles Eudora password change requests. By default, PasswdSrv is not enabled, since it allows password changes based on unencrypted requests.

Registry Entries for Mail Server

The Registry entries look something like the following:

MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MailSrv Parameters MailDirectory LoggingLevel SMTP Retry Local Retry SmtpGateway Inbound Transforms Outbound Transforms Alias Alias...

where:

MailDirectory

Is the top of the mail directory hierarchy.

LoggingLevel

Specifies flags indicating how much to dump into the event log.

SMTP Retry

Specifies the retry interval in seconds for outbound SMTP messages.

Local Retry

Specifies the retry interval in seconds for local messages.

SmtpGateway

Specifies the gateway to use for all SMTP mail. (No DNS resolving is done.)

Inbound Transforms

Are rules applied to addresses coming in. See the following section for details.

Outbound Transforms

Are rules applied to addresses going out. See the following section for details.

Alias

Specifies one alias per line. They are completely dynamic. Two examples are placed there during installation, one for Postmaster, which is required and must not be deleted, and one for MAILER_DAEMON.

Transforms

The transforms are rules applied to addresses coming in and going out. Primarily they are there so that if you own a domain, you can mask out the computernames within the domain, and vice versa.

Inbound Transforms and Outbound Transforms are each of type REG_MULTI_SZ. Each line in the MULTI_SZ is a transform, and they are searched in the order they appear. If a rule matches, it is applied, and the search is completed. If no rules are matched, then the address is unchanged.

Each transform is in the following format:

pattern > the transformed pattern

For example:

$1@$2.bitnet > $1%$2.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu

The following special tokens are recognized:

• • $(Me), which corresponds to hostname.domain
• • $(Hostname), which corresponds to hostname
• • $(Domain), which corresponds to domain

For example, the address richardw@microsoft.com would be tokenized as follows:

$1@$2 richardw = 1, microsoft.com = 2 $1@microsoft.com richardw = 1

The address rbw@williams.bitnet would be:

$1@$2.bitnet > $1%$2.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu rbw = 1 williams = 2 final = rbw%williams.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu