Mr N

The Plesk interface is pretty good for creating email addresses and configuring email options for those addresses. There is one thing that it still can’t do which I really need. I want the ability to create an email address that is virtual. That is, a valid email address that is forwarded to more than one person, but does not have a mail box behind it.

If the email needed, was just being forwarded to one person then I would set that email address up as an alias to my forward. However you can’t give the same email alias to more than one person.

Plesk uses QMail. Each user has a configuration file which describes to the system what to do with mail when it arrives for a particular mail box. When you create a new email address under Plesk it creates a standard .qmail file and fills it with filters that have the chance to stop the mail bing delivered:

| /usr/local/psa/bin/psa-spamc accept
| true
./Maildir/

| /usr/local/psa/bin/psa-spamc accept runs the spam filter [sometimes this line is not enabled]
| true NULL filter that is always successful. This is here in case there is nothing else in the file. If the filter file is empty it will fail and we don’t want that.
./Maildir/ save in the file system.

In order to make our mailbox virtual we must create it, fill it with email addresses to forward to and then not save it on to the file system.

1. Login to the Plesk UI as the domain administrator (or the box administrator and go to the admin area you wish to create the virtual email address in).
2. Go into Services->Mail.
3. Click Add New Mail Account.
4. Fill in the Create mail account in the normal way, and click the Ok button.
5. Log out of the Plesk UI.
6. Log in to the Plesk machine and go to new users qmail folder: /var/qmail/mailnames/mydomain.co.uk/my.new.user.
7. Edit the .qmail file in you favourite editor [which had better be Vim!]. Delete all the lines and replace it with

   | /usr/local/psa/bin/psa-spamc accept
   &user1@mydomain.co.uk
   &user2@mydomain.co.uk

8. Save the file and exit.

As above, the psa-spamc line is optional.
Lines starting with & are addresses to forward to.
The ./Maildir/ is missing because we don’t want to save it to a mail box.
Strictly you don’t want the | true line because we know there is more than one filter in place so there is no need to add the extra step.