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The Login View

The Login view may be called directly (ie: a link to "/rm/login.remotemail"), but it is also displayed when any client attempts to use Remote Mail functions but hasn't yet established a session.

The login view contains a form asking for a user's POP username and password , and optionally the POP server name . If the user doesn't enter a value for the mail host, then the "Default-Servername" configuration is used. Installations that have Allow-Foreign-Servers turned off can omit the mailhost field from the form altogether, but must have the Default-Servername configured.

Tags Supported

• [xid]

Login Form Fields

• new_user - the user's username
• new_password - the user's password
• new_mailhost - the POP server to use. If Allow-Foreign-Servers is configured to "off", then this field is ignored and the Default-Servername configuration is used instead.

  For explanations of these four fields, see the next section on "Determining the Return Address":

• new_return_address - The user's return address. This field is ignored if Allow-Return-Address is configured to "off".
• new_return_host - The hostname to use in the return address. Ignored if new_return_address is used.
• new_return_algorithm - Used instead of new_return_address or new_return_host for servers that determine the return address algorithmicly from the username. EIMS is the only algorithm supported.

Determining the Return Address

Frequently, the return address is not the same as the username and POP server's host name. For example, you might log in to your POP server 'mail.my.dom' as 'Joe', but your email address might be 'Joe@my.dom'. Remote Mail provides four different mechanisms for determining the user's return address. For many installations, simply allowing the user to specify their own return address is sufficient. But if you want to prevent "spoofing" of email, or save users the trouble of typing in their own addresses, you have other options.

The server attempts to discern the user's return address with the following algorithm:

1. Algorithmicly - On some mail servers, the username contains all the information needed to produce a return address. EIMS, for example, uses login names like "joe%my.dom" and "joe%other.dom" to support the same email address at different domains on the same server. During the login, if the new_return_algorithm or the Default-Return-Algorithm configuration is set to EIMS, then Remote Mail will attempt to convert the username to a return address by replacing the '%' with '@'. Note that this only works with the Eudora Internet Mail Server.

2. Explicit Return Address If the new_return_address field is provided, and the Allow-Return-Address configuration is set to "on", then the new_return_address field is used, no questions asked.

3. Return Host If Remote Mail still doesn't have a return address, it will look in the form for new_return_host and in the configuration file for Default-Return-Host. If it finds either one, it will create a username in the form of "new_username@return_host".

4. Username@POP_Host If none of the above provides a return address, then Remote Mail just uses new_username@new_mailhost or new_username@Default-Servername, as appropriate.

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