Electric Embers: Handcrafted hosting, powering the fires of change

Mail Administrators

The following information is for Mail domain administrators. If you are looking for user-level help, see the Mail Users Guide.

Administration via the Web

Connect to the Mail Admin page: https://mail.electricembers.net/admin and log in as postmaster@your-domain.org

Creating mailboxes
  1. Log in to the Mail Admin page
  2. Click [Add Mailbox]
  3. Enter the “local part” of the email address you want to add (that’s the part left of the @), a strong password, optional name, and then click the [Add Mailbox] button at the bottom. The page comes back with a success message, ready to add another.

It will take 1 minute for the account to come to life and begin receiving mail.

Deleting mailboxes
  1. Log in to the Mail Admin page
  2. Choose [Overview] and then click your domain name, or choose [Addresses] from the top menu.
  3. Find the mailbox you want to remove and click [del] all the way on the right. You will be asked for confirmation.
Alias addresses

Aliases are not full mailboxes, but simply addresses that deliver incoming email messages to other email addresses. You can use aliases to receive email for more variations of an email address (like firstname@ and firstname.lastname@) or to add “role addresses” like info@ or jobs@.

Aliases can be used to “forward” mail to an email account already hosted elsewhere, but it is problematic because it breaks SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and can be deemed spam by the receiver.

Forwarding

The best way to forward email to an outside address is to set up a server side filter. Login to the mailbox using webmail and click Settings –> Forwarding and choose “Redirect to” and enter the desired destination address. Set the Status to On, and click Save!

Changing Passwords

If a password to a mailbox is lost/forgotten, you can set a new one for that user.

  1. Log in to the Mail Admin page
  2. Find the mailbox you want and click [edit].
  3. Enter a new strong/long password and click on the [Save changes] button.

Password changes can also be made by the users themselves (unless the current password is lost), through Webmail (under Settings –> Password).

Quotas

You can adjust each mailbox’s quota (disk storage limit) from the default 5GB (5000MB) to as low or high as you wish.

DNS hosted elsewhere

If we host your domain’s DNS, we will manage the necessary records for you. But if your DNS is hosted elsewhere, you will need to make changes to activate your Electric Embers Mail service as described here.

1. You will need to set your domain’s MX (Mail eXchanger) record (but only AFTER we have set up your service here and you’ve created all mailboxes/forwarders on our system!):

Type: MX  |  Name: @  |  Precedence: 10  |  Value: smtp.electricembers.net

2. To access your Webmail most easily, you should add this A record:

Type: A  |  Name: mail  |  Value: 208.90.215.73

3. To avoid having your messages to other people spam-filtered, you should enable DKIM signing and set a DMARC policy with these two TXT records (remove any linebreaks or spaces within the Value field):

Type: TXT  |  Name: npomail._domainkey  |  Value: k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDVP6R/4V0WbPixsP7UyDKUHNNzgwHP8IkTgpSte+vPvWDuTSZLCMN0nGsxt+vXBEn7U+Mx4XXxZN1M5DCE8AerReWctGhPjumjCNeu3nj75IVKEGJFviCpob1LMZTmkZ4/AumWIy/+vu8FEilGJjxnLOEHYNJ+U2z7H+XkDHoXdwIDAQAB

Type: TXT  |  Name: _dmarc  |  Value: v=DMARC1;p=none

4. Also to avoid getting spam-filtered, enable SPF by adding a TXT record (or editing your existing SPF record) with the following:

Type: TXT  |  Value: v=spf1 a a:mail.electricembers.net ~all

5. Finally, to enable auto-configuration in open-standards apps like Thunderbird (unfortunately not in MS Outlook or Apple Mail), you can add this record:

Type: CNAME  |  Name: autoconfig  |  Value: autoconfig.electricembers.net
SPAM and VIRUS messages

Our system tags likely spam messages with [SPAM] in the subject line. These messages are then automatically filtered into the Spam folder. Messages in the Spam folder, and in the Trash will be automatically purged after 14 days.


Frequently Asked Questions:

I lost my postmaster@ password. How can I retrieve it?

The admin contact on your Electric Embers account can click “I forgot my password” on the Mail Admin page and then enter postmaster@your-domain.org (substituting in your actual Mail domain name) and click “Send me the code.” A special link to get in and reset the postmaster password will be emailed From: postmaster@electricembers.coop to our admin contact of record.

An authorized contact on your account can also email help@electricembers.coop to request a password reset.