General Principles of MainBoss Service

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In order to use MainBoss Service, you must activate a Windows service. This service watches for incoming email sent to the address associated with MainBoss Service. The service also sends out acknowledgement and notification messages when appropriate.

MainBoss Service can only be activated on a single computer; MainBoss won't let you install it on more than one computer. You need Windows Administrator privileges to install MainBoss Service.

Important: MainBoss Service is designed to run continuously. It should not be installed on a computer that is regularly turned off. (If the computer is turned off, information will not be lost. However, incoming and outgoing messages won't be processed until the computer is turned back on.)

You will find it easier to work with MainBoss Service if you install MainBoss itself on the computer where MainBoss Service will run. However, this isn't absolutely necessary.

If you stop MainBoss Service, incoming messages will stop being processed. When you restart the service, it should begin processing the backlog of messages that built up while the service was off. The same principle applies if you shut down the computer where MainBoss Service is running.

Exotic Email Addresses: The Internet's "official" rules for defining email addresses allow for a great range of constructions that are almost never actually used. For example, parentheses can be used inside addresses to enclose comments as in

jsmith(comment)@site.com

In addition, the part before the "@" character is supposed to be regarded as case-sensitive, so that jsmith and JSmith are two different email addresses.

However, MainBoss does not distinguish between letter cases in any part of the email address, nor does it allow exotic constructions like parenthesized comments. MainBoss follows the same conventions as Windows: email addresses are treated as case-insensitive, and the only characters allowed are letters, digits, underscores, dots and hyphens.

(Note that MainBoss will still receive email messages sent from exotic addresses. However, MainBoss won't send mail to such addresses or record such addresses in fields where "normal" addresses are expected.)

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