Help with Multiple Domains, POP, and Mail.app

[mollybaloo]

Newbie here. I'm sure this has been discussed previously, but I can't find it...

I'm just trying to set up POP email for my 5 custom domains using a Fastmail Enhanced account. I'm using Mac Mail.app as my email client. When sending out new emails from Mail.app, in order for the "From:" and "Reply To:" fields to appear as if they are coming from my different Domains, I assume I'll have to create 5 separate POP accounts within Mail.app, each with their custom information (but they'll all use the same Fastmail account credentials and SMTP info). But for receiving email from my fastmail account for each of these domains, there doesn't seem to be a way to configure each Mail.app account to just grab the email sent to a specific domain. They each grab ALL the email in my fastmail inbox.

What am I missing? Can anyone point me to a FAQ on setting up multiple domains with POP using a Fastmail enhanced account.

Thanks...molly

[n5bb]

Welcome to the EMD Forums, Molly! I don't use Mac Mail.app, so I will let others deal with that portion of your question. But I can help with the Enhanced domains questions. There are three main issues:

• Incoming message delivery: When you log into your Fastmail account with a browser, you can change these details for your account.
  • Each Fastmail Enhanced account includes only one Inbox, but you can create folders to automatically or manually file your messages as needed.
  • The Options>Folders screen is where you set up folders and subfolders. For example, if you had domains domain1.com and domain2.net you could set up folders named as follows:
    • domain1, with subfolders domain1.Sent Items and domain1.Trash and domain1.Junk Mail
    • domain2, with subfolders domain2.Sent Items and domain2.Trash and domain2.Junk Mail
    • You can set up other folders as you wish, such as orders.
  • The Options>Virtual Domains screen should show your domains at the bottom of the page. So you might see domain1.com and domain2.net.
  • The top of the Virtual Domains screen shows your Virtual Aliases. Every email address has a local name part, followed by the @, then a domain part. Each alias is a local name you create at one of your domains. So if you might create the aliases sue@domain1.com, orders@domain1.com, postmaster@domain1.com, and sue@domain2.net, jim.jones@domain2.net, and postmaster@domain2.net.
  • Each alias has a target. This is the destination for incoming emails which match the alias. You can use multiple targets separated with a comma, and the targets can be internal or external email addresses. The default target is your Enhanced account main Fastmail domain email address. And the default target of messages sent to your main email address is just the Inbox for your account. So, as you found, by default all of your aliases at all of your domains will target your main Fastmail domain account Inbox folder.
  • But you can change these targets. In my example described above, you might set up targets as follows. Assume that your Fastmail domain account is me@fastmail.fm. You specify a folder by adding +foldername to the local part of the address.
    • sue@domian1.com => me+domain1@fastmail.fm
    • orders@domain1.com => me+domain1@fastmail.fm,me+orders@fastmail.fm,me@gmail.com
    • and so on.
  • So this system lets you control exactly where messages sent to each alias is delivered. If each domain's messages is delivered to different folders you can read these messages separately.
  • You can also use rules to file messages into folders. But it's best to use alias targeting as the basic filing mechanism.
• Reading messages: There are two ways to read the messages stored in your Fastmail account folders.
  • Web interface: This is how you configure you account, and you can also read and sent messages while logged in. Many users only use this method.
  • Local email client program on your computer: This is what your Mac Mail.app program does. I strongly recommend you set it up to use IMAP rather than POP. IMAP is much more flexible and reliable than POP, and it allows you to easily work with folders as I have described.
  • You can set up your email client to read the Fastmail account via IMAP and leave the messages on the server but also download a local copy. This is the most flexible way to use your account, since you have local copies of messages for offline use, but you can still log into your account via the web to see all of the same messages. IMAP is designed to keep a copy of your folder structure on your local client, and when you move a message from one folder to another locally it will also move at the Fastmail IMAP storage server.
  • To make this work well, you need to subscribe to each folder you are using with your client. You set up folder subscriptions in the client, although the folder subscription information is stored on the Fastmail server.
  • Normally the client is set up to show folders at INBOX. and lower levels on the Fastmail IMAP server. Most clients allow you to change this default folder, so you should be able to use INBOX.domain1 as the default folder and only see that folder and subfolders of domain1.
• Sending messages: When you send messages, most email clients let you set up personalities to send messages with different From addresses. Your client needs to use the mail.messagingengine.com SMTP server to send messages. You use your main Fastmail account complete email address (such as me@fastmail.fm) and password to access the SMTP server.

I hope this makes sense and gives you ideas about how to set things up. My discussion above assumes that one login name/password is used to view all of the messages from those multiple domains. But you can also target some aliases to other Fastmail accounts (such as low cost Ad Free accounts or Gmail accounts), each with their own login credentials. So this can be very flexible. Please continue to ask any questions you have if my description was confusing or if you want to try another way of doing things. Many others here on this forum can also be of assistance.

Bill

[placebo]

A couple of options:

1. Just set up one POP3 account and enter your various e-mail addresses, separated by commas, in the e-mail address field for the account. When you compose a message, you can then choose which address to use. The e-mail from all the domains will be mixed together in your inbox.

2. Have the e-mail for a domain filed into its own folder and then access the folders via POP3. You'll have to set up each account separately in mail.

3. Set up one IMAP account and enter your various e-mail addresses, separated by commas, in the e-mail address field for the account, and have the e-mail for each domain filed into a folder. When you compose a message, you can then choose which address to use. IMAP will let you access the folders directly, so it's not necessary to download the mail from each folder using separate accounts in Mail.

Personally, I'd go with the last option, especially if you access your e-mail from more than one computer.

[mollybaloo]

Thanks for the suggestions. Seems like Fastmail really doesn't work great with POP and multiple domains. I was hoping to avoid migrating over to IMAP, but I guess it's about time I bite the bullet.

Thanks,

- Molly

[n5bb]

The problem isn't Fastmail, it's POP. POP is a very old email delivery standard, and the more advanced IMAP is recommended for many reasons. You can make your situation with one account work with IMAP, but it's just not practical with POP.

Bill

[mollybaloo]

I agree that IMAP is more advanced in many regards, but in my situation it's just not practical. I get over 10GB of email per year, and I'm required by law to keep every one, so I need to have all my email stored locally. I've just never been able to get IMAP configured so that I can keep everything locally, but delete from server to save space there, that's just not it's model. And I can't afford to pay for 100GB of IMAP storage in the cloud. I've ready about all of the IMAP advantages -- download headers only, synchronization of actions between server/client, multiple computer access, etc -- by I don't use any of those in my workflow. Does anyone know if there is a way within IMAP to do what I've describe, that is, keep a local copy of an email but have it deleted from the IMAP server?

Thanks,

Molly

[kurianja]

Heh, I would say Fastmail works better than many other services over POP.

Anyway, you can do precisely what you want using fastmail, by configuring the virtual domains and using 'pop from subfolder' feature. This is an outline of how you do it(Bill suggested this above in his post, but I assume you missed it)

1. Configure virtual domains in your account.
2. Set up catchall aliases(email addresses like *@yourdomain.com) and target them so that emails to each virtual domain go to a dedicated folder in your fastmail account. So, *@domain1.com can target the address yourusername+domain1@fastmail.fm, and you should have a folder called domain1 in your account. Similary, *@domain2.com should target yourusername+domain2@fastmail.fm, and you should create the folder domain2, and so on.
3. You set up multiple POP accounts in Mail.app for each of your foldernames. There's a little trick when specifying the username. You've to give it as yourusername+domain1@fastmail.fm to get the emails from the domain1 folder alone.

That should do exactly what you are after.

And I do hope that you regularly backup all your emails. Since you are supposed to keep the emails according to the law, losing them can be quite problematic, so I would really really recommend keeping remote backups as well.

See if you can make sense out of my post. Any questions, please post back.

Kurian

[mollybaloo]

Kurian/Bill,

The username+foldername trick is exactly what I was missing -- don't know how I overlooked it in Bill's email. I've now got everything set up and working perfectly. Thanks!!

-Molly