How to access mailbox for expired domain

Due to health problems I didn't check my mail for a long period AND didn't renew my domains which expired and mostly got grabbed by scalpers.

A couple of mailboxes have mail that I'd like to check, though probably mostly spam. I can't get in via webmail as login is via webmail.no-longer-my-domain.com

I tried setting up forwarding for these email addresses, but as expected it doesn't act on mail already in the mailboxes.

Any ideas?

Richard
weedsATbeedsandweedsDOTcom

I would add an entry into your hosts file for webmail.yourdomain.com and mail.yourdomain.com. That way when you go to webmail. it will automatically forward to the DH server.

Basically you edit the file at c:WINNTsystem32driversetchosts and add a line to that
192.168.0.1 webmail.yourdomain.com

I think you'll have to contact support to find out the IP address for that machine though. Enless someone else here has a quicker solution.



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

Thanks - I'd wondered about that but thought that DH would have multiple hosted domains sharing the IP. I suppose that's not a problem as long as there's only one instance of webmail on the server.

I'll wait a while then try this if nobody says it won't work and nobody comes up with a more direct solution.

Richard
weedsATbeedsandweedsDOTcom

I was thinking about this, and I can get the ip address of the mahine for you, or you can. We don't need support!

If you're familiar with SSH then you can log into your server by going to servername.dreamhost.com. To find the name of your server log into the panel > Billing > Manage Account. You'll see a list of the users you have set up, if they have shell access and what server it's on.

Once you've got shell access you can just ping webmail.yourdomain.com to see it's IP address. All of the dreamhost servers check the DH DNS for a listing first. So even though your domain is expired the entry will still be in the DNS system. Of course you can also use command line programs to check you're mail, but I'm not familiar with them off hand, though I'm sure there's something in the wiki about it.

If you're not familiar with SSH I can just ping your domain name for you and get it that way.

Or perhaps better yet you could log into the Panel > Mangage Domains > add new domain/sub-domain. Add a mirrored domian of dreamhosters.com of webmail.yourdomain.com. Give that a bit to go through, as little as 5 min as much as 4 hours. Then you should be able to just go to the subdomain you created and access your webmail install. I suspect that you could mirror mail.domain.com as well if you'd prefer to use an E-mail client (the host file method will work for your E-mail client as well)



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

Thanks - that's very helpful!

I'd half figured out the mirror idea but didnt quite get there as I was thinking of mirroring expired-domain.com. which wouldnt work, instead of [web]mail.expired-domain.com

I think I'll try that first - I've used SSH but so rarely that I tend to have difficulties each time.

Please don't invest more of your time in helping me until I've tried all of this - could be a while as I'm busy setting things up on my new domain.

Richard
weedsATbeedsandweedsDOTcom