An assistant is a second email address which receives copies of messages for local users. The assistant can be another local user or an external email address. (Note, you cannot specify a Mapping or List as an assistant).
You set the assistant by editing the user by going to the Users list, selecting the relevant user and entering the details in the user's General settings. You can either enter a local mailbox name to receive copies of messages or type in an external email address.
The Assistant facility is mainly intended for sending mail to a user's assistant, but it can also be used as a method of setting a forwarding address (i.e. all mail to this mailbox gets sent to the Assistant address as well).
If you set a local Assistant on a mailbox which has existing email, then you are given the option of copying all mail on the mailbox to the new Assistant. (This option is only available when setting the assistant through the main settings pages, not when setting it by email).
Note the assistant should be a simple email address user@domain.com, you should not enter any special characters like spaces, <, >, " etc. When VPOP3 sends the message to the assistant, it does not change the message header in any way, so the assistant setting email address will not be put into the To: field of the assistant's message.
The Assistant facility has several special features intended to make it useful as a way of sending mail to a person’s assistant:
Let’s say that the Managing Directory of a company has an email address MD, and her Personal Assistant (PA) has an email address PA, then you could set the VPOP3 Assistant for MD to be PA.
Now, if someone sends an email to MD@company, then PA will receive a copy of that email as well as MD.
However, if PA sends an email message to MD, then PA will NOT receive a copy of that email message! VPOP3 sees that the message is from the user's assistant, so does not process the Assistant setting.
Also, if the MD is very busy and normally doesn’t have time to respond to all the junk email she receives, then you could set the option Send Only to Assistant. This means that email sent to MD@company only gets sent to PA, and MD doesn’t get a copy. However, in this case, if PA sends an email message to MD, then MD DOES get the message (and PA doesn’t get a copy). This can be useful because PA can ‘vet’ all email for MD and forward any important messages onto MD for the Managing Directory to handle, whilst handling any routine messages himself without bothering MD.
Note If you just want straightforward forwarding to another address, then look at the Email forwarding and User Forwarding sections.