Using the WebMail Service

This page explains how to use the WebMail service and how it can be configured securely. For more detailed information on what each option of the WebMail settings is for, please view the WebMail page.

The WebMail Service #

Although mail clients, such as outlook, provide quick and powerful management of your mail, they do lack certain flexibility required by people on the move. Mail clients are flawed by having to be installed on every machine you wish to access your mail from. This means that accessing your mail from multiple computers costs money and can be complicated. WebMail solves all these problems and remains just as useful as a mail client. It provides access to your mail through any standard web browser and from anywhere in the world, ensuring that any computer is capable of accessing your mail. The service also has built in support for all available account options, including address books, multiple folders, filters, auto-responses and much more. If you run a large company then WebMail has even more benefits as not having to pay for lots of expensive mail clients could potentially save thousands.

Enabling the WebMail Service #

Enabling WebMail is easy and can be done by enabling a single tick box. For more information on managing the listening port, please view the Using the Listening Services page.

How WebMail Works #

The pages displayed by the WebMail service are a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and static content such as images and other files, together with dynamic data loaded from the WebMail Application Programming Interface (API). The WebMail service by default uses an integrated web server on port 8000 to run both the static and dynamic content. Port 80 is the default HTTP port but usually this will be already in use by a web server such as Internet Information Services (IIS). You can, however, configure IIS to host a website for the static content of your WebMail template by pointing this at the WebMail template folder. This will allow the static content to be loaded by IIS on port 80 and the dynamic content to be loaded via API calls to the WebMail API server on port 8000 allowing you to access in your web browser via a normal domain (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com) without having to append :8000 for the non-standard port.

Editing the Templates #

Ability Mail Server comes installed with a template called 'default'. This template is additionally intended to form the base of any customization you may wish to create. You can find detailed information on how this is done by going to the Editing WebMail Templates page.

Running Your Own 'Sign-up' Email Service #

Online email services which provide WebMail are currently very popular, as they can provide 'no-ties' email access from anywhere. This provides a great platform for advertisements, marketing, research and potential profit making. Ability Mail Server has a feature called 'Automatic Sign-ups' which allows you to run such a service. The following sections offer advice on certain aspects of an email service that are possible with Ability Mail Server.

Selling Upgrades

Because you can assign new sign-ups to a particular group, you can place them in a restricted 'free' group. This group could have a small mail size and account allocation limit and could even prevent access to POP3 and IMAP4. You can then allow your users to buy upgrades which would entitle them to larger allocation limits and even additional access to services such as POP3 and IMAP4, which would be possible by simply moving them into a different group.