DomainPOP
Contents
Use DomainPOP Mail Collection ("Setup » Server Settings » DomainPOP") to configure MDaemon to download mail from a remote POP mailbox for redistribution to your users. This feature works by using the POP3 protocol to download all the mail found in the ISP's POP mailbox associated with the specified logon. Once collected, the messages are parsed according to the settings provided on this dialog and then placed in user mailboxes or the remote mail queue for MDaemon to deliver, just as if the messages had arrived at the server using conventional SMTP transactions.
It is important to note that messages stored in mailboxes and retrieved using the POP3 protocol will be devoid of the important routing information (sometimes called the message's "envelope") that would ordinarily be supplied had the messages been delivered using the more powerful SMTP protocol. Without this routing information, MDaemon is forced to "read" the message and examine the headers in an attempt to determine to whom the message was originally intended. This is not an exact science to say the least. Message headers are sometimes notorious for their lack of sufficient information needed to determine the intended recipient. This lack of what would seem to be a fundamental characteristic of an email message - the recipient - may seem surprising but one must keep in mind that the message was never intended to be delivered to its recipient using the POP protocol. With SMTP, the contents of the message are irrelevant since the protocol itself dictates specifically to the server, during the mail transaction, the intended recipient of the message.
In order to allow for POP retrieval and delivery of mail messages in a reliable and consistent way, MDaemon employs a powerful suite of header processing options. When MDaemon downloads a message from a remote POP source it immediately parses all the relevant headers within that message and builds a collection of potential recipients. Every email address found in the headers that MDaemon inspects is included in the collection.
Once this process is complete, MDaemon's collection of recipients is divided into local and remote sets. Further, all addresses that are parsed and placed into the collection of potential recipients are processed through the Aliases translator before being divided into local and remote sets. Every member of the local set (addresses with a domain that matches one of MDaemon's local domains) will receive a copy of the message. What happens to the remote set is governed by the settings in this dialog. You can elect to simply ignore these addresses, forward a summary listing of them to the postmaster, or honor them — in which case MDaemon will actually deliver a copy of the message to the remote recipient. Only under rare circumstances would the need to deliver these messages to remote recipients be warranted.
Care must be taken to prevent duplicate messages or endlessly looping mail delivery cycles. A common problem that results from the loss of the SMTP envelope manifests itself with mailing list mail. Typically, messages distributed by a mailing list do not contain within the message body any reference to the addresses of the recipients. Rather, the list engine simply inserts the name of the mailing list into the TO: field. This presents an immediate problem: if the TO: field contains the name of the mailing list then the potential exists for MDaemon to download this message, parse the TO: field (which will yield the name of the mailing list), and then dispatch the message right back to the same list. This would in turn deliver another copy of the same message back to the POP mailbox from which MDaemon downloaded the original message — thus starting the whole cycle over again. To cope with such problems mail administrators must take care to use the tools and settings that MDaemon provides to either delete mailing list mail or perhaps alias it in such a way that it will be delivered to the proper local recipient(s). You could also utilize the Routing Rules or Content Filters to deliver the message to the correct recipient(s).
Additional concerns when employing this sort of mail collection scheme revolve around the issue of unwanted message duplication. It is very easy for mail that is delivered to the ISP's POP mailbox using SMTP to generate unwanted duplicates, once it has been collected using DomainPOP. For example, suppose a message is sent to someone at your domain and a carbon copy is sent to another person at the same domain. In this situation, SMTP will deliver two copies of the same message to your ISP's mailbox — one for each recipient. Each of the two message files will contain references to both recipients — one in the TO: field and the other in the CC: field. MDaemon will collect each of these two identical message files and parse both addresses from each of them. This would result in both recipients receiving one unwanted duplicate message. To guard against this sort of duplication MDaemon uses a control which allows you to specify a header that MDaemon will use to check for duplication. The Message-ID field is ideal for this. In the above example, both messages are identical and will therefore contain the same Message-ID field value. MDaemon can use this value to identify and remove the second message during the download stage before it can be parsed for address information.
As a final measure guarding against duplicate messages and endless looping delivery cycles, MDaemon employs a means for detecting how many trips or "hops" a message has made through the transport system. Each time an SMTP mail server processes a message it "stamps" the message with a "Received" header. MDaemon counts all such headers when it encounters a message for the first time. If the total number of mail servers exceeds a specified value, it is likely the message is caught in a delivery loop and should be taken out of the mail stream and moved to the bad message directory. This value can be configured under the Retry Queue.
See: