Key Concepts

This page defines the terms you will meet in the Admin Dashboard and throughout this documentation. Read it once before you set up your organization. For a short alphabetical list, see the Glossary.

Your organization

• Organization: your company's account in mxHERO. Domains, users, rules and settings all belong to one organization. Each organization has an ID, shown in Settings › Organization and domains. You need it for SAML sign-in, the API and support requests.
• Domain: an email domain your organization owns, such as example.com. You prove ownership with a DNS TXT record, then connect the domain. Each domain has a Server (where mxHERO delivers inbound mail) and an optional Relay Server (where mxHERO sends outbound mail). A verified domain can also be connected as an alias of another domain. See Organization and domains.
• Transport Agent: a value unique to your organization, shown in Settings › Gateway. Your mail system adds it to the messages it routes to mxHERO, so mxHERO knows the mail is yours and can prevent mail loops. See Gateway settings.
• Dashboard user: a person who can sign in to the Admin Dashboard, with the role Owner or Administrator. See Users and roles.

People and mailboxes

• Account: an email address that mxHERO knows about, usually one employee's mailbox. Accounts can have aliases, tags and assigned storage accounts. They come from directory synchronization (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or LDAP), or you add them by hand or by CSV import. Accounts are not dashboard users. See Accounts and directory overview.
• Managed account: an account that belongs to your organization. Some rule options, such as the #nomxhero opt-out, apply only when the sender is a managed account.
• Group: a set of accounts, usually synchronized from your directory. Groups can contain other groups. Use groups in rules to target a department or team. See Groups.
• Tag: a label you attach to accounts in mxHERO. Tags are not synchronized from your directory. Use them in rules to target accounts that don't share a group.

Rules

• Rule: an instruction that tells mxHERO what to do with matching email. Each rule has one action and one target, and usually a storage location and a file path. You can enable or disable a rule at any time. See How rules work.
• Action: what a rule does, for example Protect Attachments, Copy Emails or Temporary Hold. See What is Mail2Cloud? for the full list.
• Target: which email a rule works on. See Rule targets.
  • Email Flow: messages passing through the mxHERO gateway.
  • User Mailboxes: mail already stored in mailboxes.
  • Forwarding Address: a unique address created for the rule. Mail sent or copied to it is saved, and is not delivered anywhere else.
• Sender and Recipient: for Email Flow rules, who the rule applies to. Each side can be an email address, domain, group, tag, or one of the keywords Organization, Anyone or Anyone Else. Anyone Else means anyone who does not match the other side of the rule. See Senders and recipients.
• Filters and exclusions: optional conditions that narrow a rule, for example only attachments larger than a set size, or every message except those sent to a specific domain. See Filters and exclusions.

Storage

• Storage account: a connection between mxHERO and a cloud storage service. There are two kinds. See Storage overview.
  • Synced (organization) storage: an administrator authorizes mxHERO once for the whole organization, for example by approving the mxHERO app in Box, granting admin consent in Microsoft 365, or installing the app in Google Workspace. mxHERO can then save each user's email in that user's own storage. Organization connections are easier to manage and don't break when one person's sign-in expires.
  • Individual storage account: one person signs in to their own storage account. mxHERO saves to that account only.
• Storage file path: the folders and file names a rule saves content to. Paths are built from variables, so each email goes to the right folder automatically. See Storage file paths.
• Security option (link security): the kind of link a rule creates for stored files, for example a public link that expires after 7 days, a password-protected link, or a link limited to your organization. The options depend on the storage provider. See Link security options by provider.

Auto Filling

• Variable: a placeholder for a value taken from each email, written in braces, such as {Email Address} or {Subject Normalized}. mxHERO provides built-in variables, and you can create your own from conditions, regular expressions or datasets. See Variables reference and Custom variables.
• Dataset: a table of keys and values that variables can look up, for example client codes and client names. You can type entries, import a CSV file, or synchronize from a cloud storage folder. See Datasets.
• Policy: a reusable set of conditions that picks a result for each email. Policies use definitions (security definitions and template definitions) as their possible results.
  • Copy policy: chooses one or more folders to save to. See Copy policies.
  • Filter policy: decides whether a rule applies, or which attachments it handles. See Filter policies.
  • Security policy: chooses the link security. See Security definitions and policies.
  • Template policy: chooses the metadata applied to stored files in Box or Egnyte. See Template definitions and policies.

mxHERO Shares

• mxHERO Shares: cloud storage hosted by mxHERO, available as a storage choice in rules. Your organization picks a subdomain (for example acme.mxherocloud.com) and a region (US or Japan) once, at setup. Recipients open shared files on a page at that address. Depending on the link type, they sign in with a code sent by email, a Google account or a Microsoft account. See mxHERO Shares overview.

Related pages

• How mxHERO processes email
• Dashboard tour
• Glossary