This page contains helpful information about setting up and using your account at BitRelay. Please read it carefully; it contains everything you should need to get started. If things still aren't working right, feel free to contact us with your questions.

BitRelay's e-mail services are designed to be administered directly by clients. This gives you the ability to control all accounts, and not have to wait for us to make changes when you need them. The administration area is web-based; to access it go to webmail.bitrelay.net. You will see an interface with a login prompt. You can view your mail in a web-based system (similar to Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail) by providing your e-mail address and password.

You can also control your entire e-mail system by going to the administration area. If you select the account administration, simply provide your domain name and your domain password. You will be taken to the mail administration screen. It is divided into two sections: mailboxes and aliases.

The mailboxes are actual e-mail accounts with unique names and passwords. These should correspond to you and your employees: anyone who needs an individual e-mail address.

Aliases are additional e-mail addresses which simply map to a "real" mailbox. For example, every domain should have e-mail addresses for root, postmaster, and mailer-daemon. Typically these are mapped to a real user (probably you) so mail to these addresses is delivered to someone who can deal with it. You may want to create aliases for sales, webmaster, info, and so forth. Even nicknames for yourself would be appropriate; I might use jschroed and jschroeder to map to my real mailbox, jeff. There is no limit to the number of aliases you may have.

The mail administration page is fairly self-explanatory. Once you've set up your mailboxes and aliases, you might also want to set the catch-all, which is a way to route invalid addresses to a specific account. This can be useful for capturing messages sent to the wrong person (or a misspelled name), but may also cause you to receive more unsolicited mail. It's your choice whether a catch-all would be useful.

Finally, you'll need to set your mail client to receive your e-mail. Because there are so many different mail clients, it's difficult to give instructions for every one. However, all of them will require certain pieces of information as part of the configuration. These are the things you'll need:

• POP3 or IMAP (incoming mail) server: mail.yourdomain.com
• POP3 or IMAP username: you@yourdomain.com
• POP3 or IMAP password: mailboxpassword
• SMTP (outgoing mail) server: your.isp.provides.this

For example, my e-mail address at BitRelay is jeff@bitrelay.net, so I'd use the following:

• POP3 (incoming mail) server: mail.bitrelay.net
• POP3 username: jeff@bitrelay.net
• POP3 password: secret
• SMTP (outgoing mail) server: mail.earthlink.net

Two things are important to note: first, your POP3 or IMAP username is your e-mail address. Second, the password is the one associated with the mailbox (set via the administrator), not the domain (used to administer the accounts). The passwords may be identical-- there's nothing wrong with that-- but it's important to remember they're independent.

Also note that your outgoing mail (SMTP) server will be given to you by your internet service provider (ISP). BitRelay does not support sending e-mail; only receiving it. This is to prevent non-clients from sending unsolicited mail using the BitRelay servers. Please read the documentation regarding your internet connection, or contact your ISP, to determine the SMTP server to use (in my case, shown above, that's Earthlink).

Please read our E-mail Policy for more information about why we don't support outgoing mail.

If you receive a lot of unsolicited mail, you might want to read about spam filtering to learn how you can filter these messages automatically.

Be sure you don't let your e-mail "stack up" in your account. Typically, when you're retrieving your mail via a POP3 server, the messages are deleted from the server when you retrieve them. However, some mail clients allow you to keep the mail on the server-- as a result, the messages are never deleted and over time they can potentially take up a lot of disk space.

Once you've developed a web site you'd like to use, transfer the files to your account via FTP or SFTP. Put everything in the web directory, remembering that a file called index.html will be loaded by default when a user goes to your domain. The file should either be your home page, or a page that redirects appropriately.

BitRelay is using the most recent version of the Apache web server. As such, you can use htaccess security on your site if you'd like; if you don't know what it is, don't worry about it. You can also use CGI and Perl scripts, and PHP files. Of course HTML and Javascript are fine too.

If your web site needs MySQL database access, you will receive separate instruction for connecting to the database.

As part of your hosting package, you have a system account on the BitRelay servers. You can use this account to store files-- including web pages and e-mail. There are several ways to access your account:

• Telnet. Telnet is a command-line interface to the system which will let you use native Unix commands on the server to modify your files, create directories, and so on. There are many Telnet clients available for Windows and Macintosh machines; all Unix systems include Telnet by default.
• FTP. The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used to move files from your local computer to the server. Typically, when designing a web site, you'd do everything locally and then use FTP to send the finished site to the production server. Many web designer programs (DreamWeaver, FrontPage, etc.) include built-in FTP clients to make uploading your site simple.
• SSH. The Secure Shell (SSH) is an encrypted form of Telnet which prevents people from seeing usernames, passwords, or other sensitive information as you transmit it. Although it's unlikely anyone is "snooping" your connection, it's always a possibility. Use SSH in place of Telnet if possible.
• SFTP. The Secure FTP (SFTP) protocol is an encrypted form of FTP. It's useful for the same reason as SSH and should be used in place of FTP if possible.

In any of these cases, to connect to the server you'll need to provide your domain (or IP address), username, and password. The program you're using will undoubtably have places to enter this information, or will prompt you when needed.

Once you've connected to the server, there are a few things that will help you find your way around. BitRelay uses the Linux operating system, and your "home" directory will be in the /home area. You should have two sub-directories in your home directory: one is mail and one is web. Do not remove or rename these directories! The e-mail system depends on the mail directory, and the web server depends on the web directory. Without them you will not be able to receive mail or show your web page.

You will also see a file named passwd.cdb. This is your e-mail password file. Do not remove or rename this file!

The first time you login to your account (via Telnet or SSH), you'll probably want to change your domain password. To do so, type passwd at the command prompt:

[yourname@isaac yourname]$ passwd
Changing password for yourname
(current) UNIX password: (type your current password here)
New UNIX password: (type your new password here)
Retype new UNIX password: (type your new password again)
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully

This password will be your new domain password and is used to access your account and the e-mail administration system.