Mail Settings

Advanced Password Services (APS) Guide › APS Configuration File › Mail Settings

Mail Settings

When Advanced Password Services needs to send mail, it must communicate with a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail server.

The original design of APS used Microsoft's MAPI to send mail. This had advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantages included the fact that you could use your existing mail address book and that you could send mail internally when an SMTP gateway server did not exist. However, MAPI is limited to interfacing to Microsoft Exchange servers only when server programs are sending mail. Also, MAPI does not exist within the Unix environment.

Since an SMTP interface is used to send mail, addresses must be Internet mail addresses in the form of username@domain.com, rather than an internal mail system address. Multiple addresses may be the target of email, separated by commas. White space (spaces) is ignored.

To control the message sent for each event, create a file for the event, and identify that file (or files) in the APS configuration file using the settings detailed in the previous section. In APSMail parlance, these are called mail templates.

Email is sent to the SMTP server immediately. However, the SMTP server may not send the mail to the target address right away. Thus, if a delivery error occurs, such as the target address is invalid, APS is not notified (since it has long since moved on). To detect and process these cases, a site should either regularly check the SMTP error logs or use a Reply On Error address so that sending errors are returned to the sender

The template file format is described starting on page 287.

[Mail]

All of the Mail Settings appear in a special Mail section in the APS Configuration File. The section starts when the text [MAIL] (case does not matter) appears in the file and continues until the end of the file or another section starts. All of the previously described keywords do not appear in a section and therefore must appear in the file before any other section starts.

No keywords in this section support overrides.

Server

Default: none

Recommended: Yes

Complexity Level: Basic

This is the name or IP address of your SMTP gateway. APS will communicate with this server using port 25, which is assigned to SMTP. This can be either the name (such as MAIL.MYDOMAIN.COM) or the IP address (performance will be slightly faster using the IP address). You may need to obtain this information from your mail administrator.

If this field is blank or not supplied, APSMail will determine the applicable mail server using its own methods. If no server can be determined, no mail will be sent.

APSMail looks up the port number for the smtp service. If it is not explicitly configured for your machine, it will use port 25. To use a different port, configure the smtp service in your protocols file to the correct port number.

The SMTP server must support mail relaying.

Server=127.0.0.1

Log Path

Default: none

Recommended: During testing or for auditing purposes

Complexity Level: Intermediate

APSMail can log all mail files to a log file, along with the result returned by the SMTP server at the time that the mail was submitted. This setting specifies if and where such logging should occur. Just because a message is logged does not mean that it was sent. It is useful for testing where either a mail server is not available or mail should not really be sent, such as in a development environment that uses production data.

APSMail supports a number of alternate ways to set this value if it is not specified here. See the chapter entitled Using Email for complete details.

Log Path=APSMail.Log

Mail Settings

[Mail]

Server

Log Path

Directory