Getting-started Guide

How to Install the Product

The PYTHEAS MailGate product is made up of four components:

• the Communication Task: this is the central part of the product, which does all the work in the background.
• the Configuration program: lets you specify the configuration options, and includes many tools for checking your installation. It should always be installed along with the Communication Task, but you can install another instance on another machine and perform configuration tasks from this machine - this should come in handy if for some reason you do not have - or cannot use - remote terminal services.
• the Remote Control program: shows you in real time what the Communication Task is doing. You will use it on the same machine, while the the Communication Task is running as a service without being visible; you can also install it on another machine.
• the Outgoing Queue Management program: like the Configuration program, it can be run on another machine, so that you can perform the queue management from there.

Where to install it

You can install the PYTHEAS MailGate Communication Task along with the other programs on any machine with the appropriate operating system on your LAN, being able to reach the Internet. Generally it may be a good idea to install it on your mail server itself. Once the configuration tasks completed, you should set up the Communication Task as a Windows NT/200x service - do so using the button on its Configuration tab.

Basic configuration

When you run the Communication Task or the Configuration program for the first time, it will automatically launch a configuration wizard, which will ask you:

• how the Internet can be reached: if PYTHEAS MailGate needs to establish a dial-up connection, or if the Internet connection is permanent or established automatically,
• what kind of mail server you are running, and under which address it can be reached,
• if you want to handle outgoing mail through PYTHEAS MailGate,
• how to connect to one of your POP3 accounts,
• the SMTP address of one of the mailboxes on your own mail server.

The wizard will give you instructions on how to configure your mail server. Upon completion, you should be able to successfully download email from your first POP3 account into a mailbox hosted on your internal mail server: launch the Communication Task (if it isn't running already), and start a Connection Cycle (use the toolbar button in the upper left of the window).

Please note that you may want to run this wizard again at a later time, for example if you change your mail server, or want to activate outgoing mail handling through PYTHEAS MailGate.

How to Configure Incoming Mail Handling

To handle incoming mail, PYTHEAS MailGate needs to know...

• where the mail comes from: this is what the POP3 accounts list and property pages are about;
• to which mailbox on your mail server the downloaded messages should be delivered: this is what the Recipients list and property pages are about.

Creating a new POP3 account entry

Add a new POP3 account entry - click on the green plus sign in the toolbar, or hit the Insert key. Once you have entered the basic information (POP3 server, username, password), check if you can successfully connect: go to the Misc. tab, and use the Try connection button. Most of the time, it will be ok to leave the other settings as defined by default.

Creating a new Recipient entry

A Recipient is a pointer to a mailbox hosted on your internal mail server. The most important information is its SMTP address. This should be the SMTP address belonging to the Recipient's Internet POP3 mailbox. First check the address book of your mail server (Active Directory for Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2000), then use this address as SMTP address for the Recipient. In case this requires you to change the SMTP addresses in Active Directory, you may want to read this.

The next information to set is the POP3 account where the Recipient's mail comes from.

In the Message routing criteria, you configure how messages downloaded from the POP3 account are distributed. You can have several Recipients receiving mail from a single POP3 account. The easiest case is a one-to-one relationship, where you would just check the route all mail from the POP3 account to this Recipient option. For one-POP3-account-to-many-Recipients relationships, please see this page.

You can leave the other options with their default values; however, you may be interested in the following features:

• How to avoid deleting messages on the POP3 account after downloading them.
• The first Recipient entry, the one which has initially been created by the configuration wizard, has the Send session log message to this Recipient option set; please also read this for more information about this option.

Before closing the Recipient property sheet, you may want to send him a test message: click on the corresponding button, then open the messaging client and confirm that the message has been delivered into the Recipient's mailbox.

If you have many Recipients and/or POP3 accounts (let's say, more than 50), you should consider storing their configuration data in separate files. See the online help file which describes how to do so. There will be another benefit: these files are tab-separated text files, and you can edit these lists with your favourite spreadsheet program.

Setting the Schedule

Most of the time, you will want to start download sessions at regular intervals: select the every ... option, which you may want to further restrict inside a certain time interval and on certain weekdays.

How to Configure Outgoing Mail

This feature is optional, so you may skip to the next section, if outgoing mail is not handled by PYTHEAS MailGate.

Understanding outgoing mail flow

Here's how it's supposed to work:

• Your mail server sends outgoing mail to the PYTHEAS MailGate Communication Task.
• According to the outgoing mail scheduling options, messages are sent to the outgoing SMTP relay, which you indicated to the configuration wizard, or which is configured on the Outgoing mail page.

If your ISP's SMTP relay server requires authentication, you will find the available options on the Outgoing mail configuration page.

Have a glance at the Outbound transfer tab

Here is an example of what should appear in the Outbound transfer tab of the PYTHEAS MailGate Communication Task or Remote Control. When a message is accepted in the outgoing queue, you should see something like this:

[10:09] Queue [1] ESMTP Connection accepted from: mailserver.yourdomain.private
[10:09] Queue [1] Mail From: <pmgsupport@pytheas.com> SIZE=7741 RET=FULL (Pmg5C47.tmp)
[10:09] Queue [1] Rcpt To: <webmaster@pytheas.com> NOTIFY=FAILURE,DELAY
[10:09] Queue [1] Subject: This is an outgoing message
[10:09] Queue [1] Connection closed.

When the message is sent to your ISP's SMTP relay server, you should get:

[10:10] Send: Connecting to smtprelay.isp.com...Login successful...done. (ESMTP, Max size: 21000000, DSN)
[10:10] Send: Mail From: <pmgsupport@pytheas.com> (Pmg5C47.tmp, 7,4 kb, queued: 01/01/2004 10:09:54)
[10:10] Send: Rcpt To: <webmaster@pytheas.com>
[10:10] Send: Subject: This is an outgoing message
[10:10] Send: Message sent (7,4 kb).
[10:10] Send: Outbound connection closed.

If this does not work as expected, you may want to have a look at our article about troubleshooting of outgoing mail handling.

Outgoing mail schedule with a dial-up Internet connection

Most of the time, you may want to use the send outgoing first option of the Sequence of operations choices on the Schedule page. Under such conditions, the after collecting more, for... option may prove most useful. Please note that options and delays can be set depending on message priority, to let you find a compromise for urgent messages. If you want to avoid triggering an Internet connection in behalf of outgoing mail, which means that outgoing mail will be sent only during your regular schedule for incoming mail download sessions, then use the when connected anyway option.

Outgoing mail schedule with a permanent Internet connection

Under these conditions, the Collect regularly - always send immediately option of the Sequence of operations choices on the Schedule page should be most useful. Please note that with this choice, you can configure outgoing messages to be sent...

• either immediately,
• or after sitting for some time in the outgoing mail queue (the freeze in queue, for... option, depending on message priority) - thus leaving a chance to intercept an outgoing message which may have been sent by error.

The outgoing mail queue

You can manage the outgoing mail queue from the Configuration Program, or with the Outgoing Queue management program. Besides seeing the contents of the queue, you can also freeze or unfreeze messages, or remove messages from the queue, which will then be returned to the sender.

There are a couple of parameters to fine-tune the way outgoing mail is handled; some require direct editing of the configuration file; see the online help file for more details.

How to Define Exceptions in Incoming Mail Delivery

To define exceptions in incoming message delivery, you can use content-checking rules. There are two kinds of rules: interception and pass-through. If a match occurs for an interception rule, the action associated with the rule will be performed. If a match occurs for a pass-through rule, message delivery will be done as usual; this kind of rule is used to stop the content checking engine trying to find a match at a certain point, when walking through the list of rules from top to bottom.

Let's see an example: we choose not to allow attachments containing executable files to be directly delivered to internal mailboxes. Proceed as follows:

• Add a new rule to the list, and give it some meaningful name, for example Block executable attachments. Define it to be an interception rule.
• On the What to check pages, switch to the Attachments tab, Enter the list of patterns for attachment file names which should be detected by this rule: *.exe; *.bat; *.com; *.pif; *.scr (please note that this is not a complete list of patterns for dangerous attachment tracking!). If later a message has several attachments, then an interception rule match will occur when at least one of the attachment file names matches a pattern in the list.
• In the What to do part of the rule, let's keep it simple for the moment: specify for example to send a notification + headers to the intended Recipient(s) (such a notification will not contain the offending attachment), and a notification + message to somebody in the IT department (for further analysis - this kind of notification contains the complete original message as an attachment).
• Try it: click on the Try content-checking rules button, and see what happens for a message containing an attachment named something.pif.

You can find another example here. Please note that the notification messages are based on templates which can be customized (cf. the online help file).

Virus checking

The anti-virus interface submits each incoming message to a file-level real-time on-access virus scanner. We have a dedicated web page on this topic.

Spam detection

Spam detection can be done using SpamAssassin (tm). We have a dedicated web page how to get SpamAssassin and PYTHEAS MailGate work together to help you fight spam.

Supervision

The PYTHEAS MailGate Remote Control program allows you to keep track in real time of what PYTHEAS MailGate is doing. You can also use it to start an out-of-sequence connection cycle.

Install it on your workstation using the appropriate option in the setup program that you have downloaded from the Internet. When you run it for the first time, go to the Preferences tab and enter the name of the machine where the Pytheas.Mailgate service (or Communication Task) is running.

Another source of information are session log messages, which we already mentioned in this document.

Keep track of Internet mail flow

For each incoming and outgoing message, PYTHEAS MailGate can write a line to a log file, which can be queried by a CGI program. Configure this feature on the Logging tab.

Customization

All system messages which are generated by PYTHEAS MailGate are made from templates, which can be customized and translated. Please see the online help for more information, Templates for System Messages chapter.