Technical Information - Unified Domain Wide Accounts Explained

    A unified domain wide e-mail account is something which  companies and organizations are using more and more. As long as you have your own domain name it allows you to have an "e-mail server" on your own internal network even when your network is connected to the Internet via an intermittent (floating IP) dial-up account.

      Having your own "mail server" has many advantages. It allows you to add delete and maintain e-mail accounts yourself and it can also, if properly configured, reduce the costs of and Internet connection calls by scheduling connections to the Internet and handling internal e-mail without connecting to the internet.

How does a UDWA account work?

Receiving e-mail:
     Your domain name is set-up on the SAN e-mail server. The set-up specifies that ALL e-mail sent to your domain irrespective of the name in front of the @ symbol is directed to a single POP3 mailbox (this is a normal e-mail account).
     This means that e-mail sent to info@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com, fredb@yourdomain.com etc. all ends up in the e-mail box named all@yourdomain.com.
You then have an "e-mail server application which periodically dials up and collects the e-mail in the box named all@yourdomain.com.
     When e-mail is stored in a mailbox it still contains a lot of information about where the e-mail was from how it got to you and, most importantly, who it was meant for. The e-mail server at your end looks through all this information and redirects each e-mail to a mailbox (that you have set-up) associated with the correct address.
     When the clients on your internal network want to collect their e-mail they log into the e-mail server on your local network and download the e-mail from their mailbox.

Sending e-mail:
When someone on your internal network wants to send e-mail they compose and send the e-mail as normal. The mail server in the settings is set to your internal "mail server". Your e-mail server then stores all this e-mail and on a scheduled basis sends it on to the Internet via SAN e-mail server.