Daniel
Here is the whole story. I would just like to start by saying that this is
in no way how I would have desired to configure this system but it was an
ugly necessity to get these users off of the crapy sendmail system they were
on. Basically I have an IMail server configured as host mail.mydomain.com
with a host alias for mydomain.com. On the sendmail system there also
existed 48 host aliases for sub domains such as ant.mydomain.com. These
host aliases work just the same as host aliases in IMail. The killer
limitation that I ran into is that you can only have 25 host aliases with a
max length of 255 characters on IMail. To get around this I stumbled across
the following oddity with IMail. If I point the MX for ant.mydomain.com to
the host mail.mydomain.com the server will receive mail for
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Actually it does not accept it for delivery at first
but accepts the message for relay. When IMail goes to relay the message it
does an MX lookup for ant.mydomain.com and receives direction back to it's
self. I am theorizing that for some reason this prompts it do a local
delivery with mydomain.com. At any rate that's what happens. The problem
here is that host mail.mydomain.com must first accept the message for relay.
Unless you want to open your system as an wide open relay you have another
hurdle to cross. To get around this issue I setup a sendmail system to
receive mail for ant.mydomain.com. I then pointed the MX for
ant.mydomain.com to relay.relaysystem.com. You can configure sendmail in
such a way as to have it "route" mail based on domain with out doing an MX
lookup. Thus mail would come in from the Internet to the relay system and
then be routed to the IMail box. I then only had to add the IP address of
the relay system to the allow table on the IMail system. But I now had
another problem. I had changed the MX record for ant.mydomain.com to point
to the relay system and not directly to the IMail system. This broke the
functionality of IMail relaying messages for [EMAIL PROTECTED] back to
its self. To fix this I had to tweak the DNS host that IMail uses for
lookups. I had to make that host report back that the MX for
ant.mydomain.com directed to mail.mydomain.com. Obviously this DNS host can
not be the same host that the rest of the world looks to for MX records for
ant.mydomain.com or you break the whole thing over again. As you can see
this is very elaborate and not a preferred way of configuring a mail system.
If this helps anyone out - Great. If I had my way I would ask that IMail
expand the capability to allow at least a greater number of host aliases (50
aliases with 1000 character max). In a perfect world I would ask for
unlimited host aliases configured in a text file. Perhaps hostaliases.txt.
Jeff
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Daniel Donnelly
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2001 8:54 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum]
Jeff,
I have no particular need, myself, but others here might like to know. But I
guess I'll let them ask. I sort of figured there would be a bunch of DNS
stuff to do (each hostname would have to have an MX that points to the IMail
host). When you mentioned Sendmail, that gave me a clue that tells me how it
is redirected to the IMail domain.
That also means Yuri's answer was correct, IMail does not use a wildcard
(*.domain.name) in its Alias field.
Daniel Donnelly
________________________________________________________
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Madison" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 7:30 PM
Subject: RE: [IMail Forum]
> You are correct. It does not work with out a great deal of magic. If you
> are interested in the whole story let me know. I'll just say that it
> requires a sendmail gateway and tweaking your DNS servers.
>
> Jeff
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Daniel Donnelly
> Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 3:00 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [IMail Forum]
>
>
> Jeff,
>
> Describe what you mean by 'work'! Do you mean that the mail was actually
> delivered to the users account?
>
> The only way IMail might accept email with a 'different' hostname or
alias,
> is when SMTP Security is set to 'Relay for Anyone'. With that, IMail will
> accept any email, regardless of the username or domain name, but no
> guarantee that IMail can actually deliver it to the destination. If it
> cannot, it will eventually bounce back to the sender. If your test message
> has not reached the user, I think you will find it in the Queue, with
> multiple tries, or even 'looping' back to itself (depending on DNS/MX
data).
>
> A test here with different Relay settings (Addresses) showed that IMail
> would not use the '*' character as a wildcard for the Alias. The message
was
> not accepted by SMTP ('not a gateway' response was observed) .
>
> Daniel Donnelly
> ________________________________________________________
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jeff Madison" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 11:59 AM
> Subject: RE: [IMail Forum]
>
>
> > This is interesting because I did and it works great.
> >
> > Jeff
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Yuri Levenfeld
> > Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 4:38 PM
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Re: [IMail Forum]
> >
> >
> > no, you can't
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Jeff Madison" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 3:40 PM
> > Subject: [IMail Forum]
> >
> >
> > > Does anyone know if you can use an '*' in the host alias field. I am
> > > setting up a mail host for mail.domain.com and want the server to
accept
> > > mail for [EMAIL PROTECTED] I want to put the following in the
> > host
> > > alias field:
> > >
> > > *domain.com
> > >
> > > Jeff
> > >
> > >
> > > Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
> > > to be removed from this list.
> > >
> > > An Archive of this list is available at:
> > > http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
> >
> >
> > Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
> > to be removed from this list.
> >
> > An Archive of this list is available at:
> > http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
> >
> >
> > Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
> > to be removed from this list.
> >
> > An Archive of this list is available at:
> > http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
> >
>
>
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>
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