Mail Receive Rules

Defines the rules by which ListManager determines whether or not mail should be processed.

By default, ListManager looks at the username of email it receives to determine whether it should process the message. The host name portion of the mail address is not consulted. It does this to support any number of virtual hosts without needing to be configured. By default, ListManager will automatically assume the hostname identity of any email it receives which is addressed to a valid ListManager user name.

This Mail Receive Rules option allows you to change this default behavior, so that ListManager first looks at the rules you have defined, and if the local recipient address does not match a rule, the message is not processed.

The Mail Receive Rules are simple text search rules. For example, to accept any mail addressed to the "yourcompany.com" domain, the rule would be:

yourcompany.com

This would allow any of these different addresses to be received:

lyris@yourcompany.com
lyris@lists.yourcompany.com
lyris@discussions.yourcompany.com

But any address which did not have "yourcompany.com" in it would be rejected. If your rule was "@yourcompany.com", only the first example above "lyris@yourcompany.com" would be accepted.

The most common use for this feature is if you are using ListManager in front of another mail server, and you want to make sure that ListManager only accepts mail addressed to itself, and forwards on any mail addressed otherwise. If you have told it to "Forward non-ListManager Mail" to another location, any mail which does not match a "Mail Receive Rule" will automatically be forwarded on to the other server. See "Forward Mail".

If you do not have "Forward non-ListManager Mail" defined, then mail which does not match a Mail Receive Rule will simply be rejected.

You can define multiple Mail Receive Rules, each on a separate line.