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A virtual domain is a way to use your own domain at OKmail. It allows you setup your domain at our servers so email sent to your domain (e.g. something@yourdomain.com) is directly delivered by other email systems to our servers and into your mailbox.
Additionally, you can also publish and share files or directories from your file storage to a website at http://yourdomain.com.
Please note that you currently can't purchse or register domains through us, you must first do this through a domain registrar. See here for some suggested registrars. Once you've registered the domain, see the steps below for configuring it to use our servers.
First you need to ensure your account level supports virtual domains by checking the pricing table in the "Aliases/Own domain email" section. If your account supports virtual domains, just login to your account and go to the "Options" screen then the "Virtual Domains" screen. On that screen, add your domain in the section at the bottom. Then in the top section, add the aliases/addresses in your domain you want to use.
If you do not wish to upgrade your account, you can use an external mail forwarder. See this FAQ entry for a comparison.
If you want the email going to a particular email address in your virtual domain to go to a different account, enter the account name in the Target column. Also see this FAQ entry for more details on using the Target column.
You can also create a special 'catchall' alias, see here for more details.
The number of virtual domains and virtual domain aliases you can use is also determined by your service level, see the pricing table again for details.
Once you've added your domain, you have change the DNS for your domain to point to our servers. See below for more information on doing that.
Depending on what features you want OKmail to handle for your domain, you need to setup the DNS for your domain slightly differently. The DNS for your domain will be controlled by your domain registrar. Unfortunately each registrar uses slightly different DNS handling software, though the general abilities of each should be the same.
When you signed up your domain, your registrar should have given you some login details to their "control panel" for your domain. You'll need to login to their control panel to change the DNS settings for your domain as described below.
Your requirements to host your domain should fall under the following categories:
NOTE:These are the "name server" (NS) records to use. If you are going to host an external website, you should set the "mail exchanged" (MX) records instead to the values in this section. If you set the MX records to the above values, email for your domain will not work.
That's all you have to do to get your domain email running. If you want to set up your web site with OKmail, follow the instructions here
If you want to just support email to @yourdomain.com, you only need to add MX records for yourdomain.com. If you want to support sub-domain addressing you'll need to add MX records for yourdomain.com AND wildcard records for *.yourdomain.com.
If your domain registrar does not give you a domain manager, you can use OKmail as a domain manager via our Custom DNS screen for your domain.
If you want to just support http://yourdomain.com, you only need to add A records for yourdomain.com. If you want to support http://www.yourdomain.com or http://somethingelse.yourdomain.com, you'll need to also add A records for www.yourdomain.com and somethingelse.yourdomain.com, or alternatively, add wildcard A records for *.yourdomain.com.
If your domain registrar does not give you a domain manager, you can use OKmail as a domain manager via our Custom DNS screen for your domain.
Yes, but only if you want a particular domain to work for web access. If you want to use a domain for email, never use CNAME records, it will break email for your domain in horrible ways.
When you normally send email to a domain via SMTP or the web interface, it's forwarded to one of our outgoing servers, which then looks up the MX records for the domain and sends them to the appropriate servers for the domain.
However if the domain you are sending to is one hosted by OKmail, there's no reason for us to send to the MX servers for the domain, because that's just our MX servers. Instead it would be better just to route it internally.
However we can't do that automatically for every domain added, because people could add domains on the Virtual Domains screen that they don't actually own and don't point to us, and try and capture email for those domains. (eg hotmail.com, etc)
So the approach we use is that you can choose one of two routing modes:
The DNS column will tell you if the DNS for the domain is pointing to our servers or not. This column is rechecked every hour if the DNS is not pointing to us, but only every day if it is. If the DNS is pointing to us but you want email routed to the MX servers for the domain, just change the Routing to "Force Ext"
There are two main advantages to internal routing:
When you use a virtual domain, you can control sub-domain addressing for your virtual domain. The options are:
Sub-domain addressing is handled like regular OKmail domains, that is:
blah@something.yourdomain.com -> something+blah@yourdomain.comSub-domain addresses are treated the same as regular domain addresses, that is:
blah@something.yourdomain.com -> blah@yourdomain.comSub-domain addressing is disabled for your domain.
When sub-domain addressing is disabled for your domain, this can mean two things:
See this FAQ entry for more examples on setting up external sub-domain handling.
As an example say that you have yourdomain.com, but have set the DNS for lists.yourdomain.com and forum.yourdomain.com to be handled by different mail servers (eg MX records point to other servers). In this case you have two choices.
With virtual domains, you can create the special alias "*@yourdomain.com" called a 'catchall'. This will catch email to all addresses in your virtual domain not already caught by a particular alias. For example, if you've created name1@yourdomain.com and name2@yourcompany.com and you want to catch everything else, use a single '*' as the alias name.
Plus addressing with catchall is very useful for virtual domains. It helps sort mail into folders, it conserves on aliases and requires few steps to configure. Addresses are kept concise.
For example, jcitizen@okmail.net owns the virtual domain 'example.org'. jcitizen@okmail.net does not currently have a catchall for example.org. jcitizen creates a new catchall alias by adding the alias *@example.org with a target of 'jcitizen+*@okmail.net'.
jcitizen@okmail.net then subscribes to a mailing list about sandwiches, signing up as 'sandwiches@example.org'. The mailing list fills his Inbox folder with mail. Eventually, jcitizen@okmail.net decides the mailing list is too much for his Inbox, so he creates a Folder in his account named 'sandwiches' (not 'inbox.sandwiches'). Thereafter, all mail he receives from the sandwiches mailing list gets put straight into the folder 'sandwiches' not into the folder Inbox.
For more information on plus-addressing, see this FAQ entry.
Basically, DNS is the way that a domain name like "yourdomain.com" gets turned into an actual machine to access (IP internet address). This process is called a 'DNS lookup'.
A DNS lookup goes through two stages.
There are actually several different types of DNS lookups. If you go to http://yourdomain.com in a web-browser it does a lookup for the "A" (Address) record. If you send an email to something@yourdomain.com it does a lookup for the "MX" (Mail eXchanger) record.
This means that you can have completely separate systems and providers to handle web or email for your domain.
So for the case of email delivery, you want to change the MX records for your domain so they point to the ones described in this FAQ entry.
However, there needs to be a way to distribute the DNS information for your domain to the world. This is what "name servers" do. Usually when you buy a domain, the name servers for your domain are the name servers of the people you bought the domain from.
Now most domain registrars allow you to change the DNS information for your domain, though some are more limited than others. Some you have to request through email, some have a web interface. Some allow 'wildcard' *.yourdomain.com records, others don't. etc.
We recommend that you have at least 2 MX records, which means a sender will try up to 2 different servers to send the email to. This means that if main server isn't responding, it's got at least 1 backup server to try. It's also extremely useful to be able to use wilcard style *.yourdomain.com records so that you can get sub-domain addressing.
So what do you do if your registrar doesn't support these. Well you can either nag them until they do, or you can change the name server your domain uses!
You have two main options here.
OKmail can be the nameserver for your domain. If you set us to be the name server for your domain, then by default we will supply the correct MX records for your domain to point to us, and the correct A records for your domain to point web requests to your file storage area. So if you want to handle email for your domain through OKmail and host a basic website in your file storage area, then just get your domain registrar to point the name servers for your domain as described in this FAQ entry.
If you want more control over the DNS records for your domain, you can do that via OKmail as well by using the Custom DNS screen.
Previous to have this greater control, you would have had to use an external DNS provider like ZoneEdit or My Domain, that's no longer required because our Custom DNS screen can basically do everything their DNS control panels could.
Also see the Webopedia entry for more information and links on DNS.
It can be handy to have email addresses which broadcast to multiple receipients. For instance, you can use this feature to create a 'customer support' address which is sent to multiple staff members. Or use it to create a 'staff' address which is sent to all of your staff members.
To create such an address, you firstly need to set up a virtual domain. Then, simply create an alias in that domain with whichever name you require (e.g. "staff"), and set the target of that alias to the list of recipients for that group, placing a comma between each name. For instance, "user1@example.com,user2@example.com". You now have a broadcast email address set up!
The following people sell domains at a good price. We don't officially endorse any of them, but we've used them, and know other people who've used them too.
Those on a budget may still find a forward a good option. A good description of how to setup an use forwarding services is here.
Assuming you want a setup with both email and websites for your domain are hosted at OKmail, here's step by step instructions.
ns1.messagingengine.com ns2.messagingengine.com
This causes the registrar to tell the rest of the Internet (eventually -- this can take a few hours to make it everywhere) that when your domain name is used for email or web addressing (including HTTP or FTP addressing), then the server that can supply the numeric address (from a lookup table) is ns1.messagingengine.com (run by OKmail), and if this fails then the backup is ns2.messagingengine.com.
One more detail about the Virtual Aliases screen: If you set (as just described) *@mydomain.com to target your username, then any email sent to your domain (with any username before the @) will go into your Inbox. But let's say that you want to set up email folders for Bob, Sue, and Jerry -- and direct their addressed mail to those folders. There are three ways to do this: