Toby Documentation

Logging In

Users at Toby's login screen are presented with a simple form to login; only their e-mail address and password for that account are necessary. The user can choose here to stay logged in even after closing the browser; this function requires that cookies be allowed.

Toby supports both IMAP and POP3 mail protocols. (If you don't know what these are, don't worry. You don't need to to use Toby.) After the user logs in, Toby begins some work on determining the user's mail server and protocol.

Toby begins by checking if a user from this domain has logged in on this server before. If they have, their host and protocol will be stored in the email_hostss database. If they have not, Toby begins to check a number of possible hosts for a correct username and password combination.

If the user entered my.username@domain.com, Toby will check all combinations of the hosts www.domain.com, mail.domain.com, pop.domain.com, email.domain.com, imap.domain.com, and domain.com, the usernames my.username and my.username@domain.com, and the POP3 and IMAP protocols for a successful connection. If none of these are successful, Toby will then check again, using the name of the host at which domain.com is hosted. For example, efinke.com is hosted on ida.affordablehost.com. If Toby was not able to connect to any of the efinke.com variations, it would try ida.affordablehost.com. This type of host determination is unique to Toby, and is not found in other webmail programs.

Upon determining a user's host and protocol, it will store those values in the email_hosts and email_users databases for future reference. If Toby cannot determine the user's mail server, it will ask the user for it.

Next: Message retrieval