Incoming Mail

Incoming Mail or How does mail get to me?

All external mail destined for one of our mail domains is first delivered to a UBC Mail Relay, where it is scanned for spam, viruses and phishing messages. Messages with a spam probability > 99%, viruses & phishing messages will be rejected All other mail will be tagged ( one or more Header lines are added to the messages) and delivered to the local IMAP/POP server mail.phas.ubc.ca which uses the Dovecot implementation. Mail is stored into a user's mailbox using Dovecot's deliver Mail Delivery Agent. deliver makes use of the Sieve programming language to create individualized filters.

Internal mail ( that which originates from within the local domains) does not get sent to the UBC Mail relays, but is dleievered directly to mail.phas.ubc.ca.

The users' mail files are available on the login hosts in /mail/\$HOME. ( \$HOME is a UNIX shell environment variable set to a user's home directory. eg /home/fred> or /home2/wilma ). The dovecot setup uses the Maildir mailbox format to store the messages. The individual messages will be stored below the Maildir subdirectory. It is recommended to interface with mail messages only through an IMAP/POP client.

The sieve filters are stored in .dovecot.sieve file. See the sieve page for examples.