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Forwarding Only

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Forwarding Only
I have been a Gossamer Mail user for almost a year and am looking at modifying the mail system to only forward mail to a users permanent email account.

I currently am using Gossamer Mail as the user database for my busy railroad hobby web site (trainorders.com). Gossamer Mail has worked pretty reliably and I currently have over 5000 users on the system.

The problem is with the latest wave of worms and viruses my users are complaining they do not want the email accounts that I force them to have as it is integrated into my system. During the height of the crises I was getting dozens of support emails daily that I did not have time to answer.

Looking towards the future I am looking at eliminating the email accounts and offering message forwarding only. For the short term Gossamer Mail looked real good to me. But I am not sure if I am ready to be an email administrator for 10,000+ accounts as the years pass.


Now what I am looking at doing is to create a new user management system operating off PHP which I use for the rest of my site and utilize Gossamer Mail as a mail forwarding system. That is mail will be accepted for all usernames@trainorders.com and forwarded to the users permanent email address they specified when they registered. The user would also have the option of turning mail forwarding off which would cause Gossamer to send a return email specifying "This user does not accept mail."

One thing I forgot to mention is I had Gossamer Mail modified by the folks at Gossamer-Threads to require users to specify a permanent email address when registering and requiring them to enter an activation code to turn their account on. This was originally to prevent people from create several accounts and to give me a way of contacting the people who cause problems in my discussion forums. This worked for about 6 months when things got out of hand. As a result I stopped sending the activation code and substituted it with a snail mail address for sending
a $7 check to have new accounts turned on. The result was the garbage clientele went away and I now I am bringing in a few hundred dollars a month to pay for my operations. Now my goal is to create a seperate system in php for online credit card acceptance for turning new accounts on.

Any thoughts on making the system for forwarding only?


Todd Clark



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Re: Forwarding Only In reply to
Hi,

If all you need is mail forwarding, I would recommend doing this on the mail server level if you have a dedicated machine.

If you are interested, we can install and setup qmail and integrate into your signup so that forwards happen automatically, and if users don't want to forward, it would bounce. Drop me an email if you are interested.

Cheers,

Alex

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Gossamer Threads Inc.