Virtual Accounts

A prerequisite is that you have a domain that is hosted on the account before adding virtual accounts.

Virtual Accounts are used for email addresses and/or an FTP login to access a folder in your account. You can create any number of Virtual Accounts using the Virtual Account Manager tool in the control panel. There is no additional cost for Virtual Accounts, although any disk space used by one will contribute to your overall disk and bandwidth usage.

Both Parent and Child accounts can have Virtual Accounts if they have a hosted domain, allowing a customer to host domains under different child accounts and then allowing them to have multiple mailboxes, an ideal structure for someone who wants to use Islandnet.com as a host but wants to be a web designer by trade and invoice .

Configuring an email client

If you want to configure an email application to connect to the mailbox of a virtual account this can be achieved using:

POP3/IMAP server: mail.islandnet.com

SMTP Server: mail.islandnet.com

SMTP Authentication enabled with SMTP Port set to 587

Username: fullemail@domain.com (Complete email for virtual account)

And the password that you chose when setting up the account. Secure Password Authentication (SPA) is supported.

For webmail access Virtual Accounts can login to HelpDesk, RoundCube or SquirrelMail clients.

Converting Child Accounts to Virtual Accounts

Customers who use Child accounts solely for email may want to convert these to Virtual accounts as in the current plan structure child accounts are additional an charge, to illustrate how you would convert child account to a virtual account we will write a little scenario

Scenario.

Bill owns billscarsales.com and has 3 staff, each staff member has child accounts called bcsales1, bcsales2 and bcsales3 and has a map file that currently looks like this:

info: bcsales1
sales:bcsales2
finance:bcsales3
bob:bcsales1
*:!

Firstly Bill would go to Virtual Account Manager and create 3 accounts info@billscarsales.com, sales@billscarsales.com and finance@billscarsales.com, immediately after doing this any new mail sent to those 3 addresses will be stored in a different location on the account, there will be a .mailboxes folder in the parent account file space and in it 3 folders each with the email address as the name. The existence of virtual accounts is always checked first before the map file is processed.

So now these 3 new mailboxes are in place Bill should tell each mail client to check for email one last time before going into the email account settings and changing the username from for example, bcsales1 to info@billscarsales.com and entering the password used when creating the virtual account. The username has to be the full email address, the authentication process here see's the @ in the username and knows to try to authenticate the login attempt as a virtual account

Then for the final entry you would go into Email Alias Manager and add an entry for bob in the Local part and select Forward To as the Action and enter the Virtual Account that replaced the child account bcsales1, in this example its info@billscarsales.com.

As a final entry on the Email Alias Manager you can close the email for the domain so only the addresses defined as Virtual Accounts or aliases work, You do this by putting a wildcard in the Local Part which is * and having if you fail: with an optional message such as "No such email address" or Discard which deletes the message without notification to the sender also known as blackholing the email.

Failing to close off the Email Aliases in this manner would mean that in this example I could email billybob@billscarsales.com and as there is no existing Virtual Account and no Email Alias to catch it the mail is delivered into the mail Parent account mailbox.

If you have a large amount of child accounts that your wanting to migrate then you can do the migration in stages, so Bill in could of just decided to create info@billscarsales.com in the virtual account page and then changed his map file to:

sales:bcsales2
finance:bcsales3
*:!

This way info would go to the virtual account and sales and finance would go to the existing child accounts.

Using Virtual Account for FTP access

If you want to use a virtual account for FTP access then you have the FTP box checked and then specify in the HOME field a path, so if Bill wants sales@billscarsales.com to be able to upload new car sales PDF spec sheets he might put /www/pdf/newcars/ as the path. That way when the sales@billscarsales.com connects using FTP server ftp.islandnet.com he will only get access to the /www/pdf/newcars/ folder and to him this will be the top level folder, he will not be able to move up into the /www/pdf folder or /www or /.

Other notes regarding Virtual Accounts

• Virtual accounts can login to https://hd.islandnet.com but they are restricted to a subset of tools, including Email, PEP Mailrule Wizard, PEP Mailrule Editor
• Virtual Accounts mailbox files reside in the .mailboxes folder of an account.
• Virtual account use disk space that contributes to the parent account disk usage.
• mailrule and .quota files can be created in the /.mailboxes/email@domain.com folder for any virtual account by either using the PEP Mailrule Wizard, PEP Mailrule Editor or manually using, for example, File Explorer