Re: virtual mail domains... long-winded response
On Thu, 19 Dec 1996, Carl Greco wrote: I have set up a couple of Linux based e-mail servers with uucp. The main advantages of uucp are low cost and local control of e-mail accounts. Exactly the reason why I like it. The latest system (a 386SX-16MHz 4MB PC) uses Debian 1.1 with smail and qpopper (pop3) to distribute e-mail to a LAN comprised of WfWg PC's running Eudora Light clients. The major disadvantage is the addressing currently required, i.e., [EMAIL PROTECTED] instead of [EMAIL PROTECTED] I suspect that the proper MX record at the ISP would fix this. I don't use smail, so I can't comment there, but with sendmail you can choose the type of uucp addressing to use. I use Taylor's uucp which is smart enough to understand domain based addressing so on my mail machine I specify the uucp-dom mailer and my Internet provider does the same. Hope this helps. Best regards, Nick -- Nick Busigin Sent from my Debian/GNU Linux Machine[EMAIL PROTECTED] To obtain my pgp public key, email me with the subject: get pgp-key -- -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: virtual mail domains... long-winded response
On Wed, 18 Dec 1996, Al Youngwerth wrote: I'd sure like to hear from other ISPs and linux masquerading/diald users out there and how they handle virtual domains. Using linux with masquerading and diald is becoming a very popular way to connect small LANs to businesses so I think its something that ISPs should support well. More ideas and comments? Hello Al, What do you think of using MX records to a uucp host and using uucp and sendmail's uucp-dom mailer? You can use uucp over a TCP/IP connection, so it should work with well with diald. Nick -- Nick Busigin Sent from my Debian/GNU Linux Machine[EMAIL PROTECTED] To obtain my pgp public key, email me with the subject: get pgp-key -- -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: virtual mail domains... long-winded response
According to Nick Busigin: On Wed, 18 Dec 1996, Al Youngwerth wrote: I'd sure like to hear from other ISPs and linux masquerading/diald users out there and how they handle virtual domains. Using linux with masquerading and diald is becoming a very popular way to connect small LANs to businesses so I think its something that ISPs should support well. More ideas and comments? Hello Al, What do you think of using MX records to a uucp host and using uucp and sendmail's uucp-dom mailer? You can use uucp over a TCP/IP connection, so it should work with well with diald. Nick -- Nick Busigin Sent from my Debian/GNU Linux Machine[EMAIL PROTECTED] To obtain my pgp public key, email me with the subject: get pgp-key -- I have set up a couple of Linux based e-mail servers with uucp. The main advantages of uucp are low cost and local control of e-mail accounts. The latest system (a 386SX-16MHz 4MB PC) uses Debian 1.1 with smail and qpopper (pop3) to distribute e-mail to a LAN comprised of WfWg PC's running Eudora Light clients. The major disadvantage is the addressing currently required, i.e., [EMAIL PROTECTED] instead of [EMAIL PROTECTED] I suspect that the proper MX record at the ISP would fix this. -- \/ \ Carl Greco PHONE voice: (402) 496-3381 / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \==/ -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: virtual mail domains... long-winded response
It seems like a lot of ISPs don't support uucp or charge extra to set it up so I've never really explored it. It may just be that a lot of ISPs don't advertise that they support it (and I haven't been asking). I'll look into uucp over TCP/IP. Thanks, Al Youngwerth [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- From: Nick Busigin[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 1996 4:44 PM To: 'debian-user' Cc: Al Youngwerth Subject:RE: virtual mail domains... long-winded response On Wed, 18 Dec 1996, Al Youngwerth wrote: I'd sure like to hear from other ISPs and linux masquerading/diald users out there and how they handle virtual domains. Using linux with masquerading and diald is becoming a very popular way to connect small LANs to businesses so I think its something that ISPs should support well. More ideas and comments? Hello Al, What do you think of using MX records to a uucp host and using uucp and sendmail's uucp-dom mailer? You can use uucp over a TCP/IP connection, so it should work with well with diald. Nick -- Nick Busigin Sent from my Debian/GNU Linux Machine[EMAIL PROTECTED] To obtain my pgp public key, email me with the subject: get pgp-key -- -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: virtual mail domains... long-winded response
[ snip ] We do virtual domains with POP3 here by using a custom local mailer and a modified version of qpopper. The first step is to create a virtual_pop transport, then a virtual_pop director, e.g. This seems crazy to me. Originally, this was that approach I was going to take. However, I didn't want to be forced to run a different MTA other than smail. Not that smail's all that great, but it's the beast I'm familiar with. Also, smail supposedly supports virtual domains, but you have to run multiple copies of it... which wasn't all that appealing. What I eventually settled on was to have it all done by elm's filter(1). The reason for this was because I realized that I didn't need virtual POP interfaces, I needed virtual addresses and that was it. In fact, I concluded that having accounts like [EMAIL PROTECTED] was a bad idea since they're not directly mapped to an individual and that the login and password would be probably known by several individuals at SomeCompany as the job of handling the info mail got passed on from employee to employee. So, I figured that what I really wanted were *aliases* that would send [EMAIL PROTECTED] to some single individual on the system. I was able to pull this off by aliasing names like info and sales to myself. Then, in my .elm/filter-rules file, I'd put lines like: if To contains client1.com and not To contains jemenake forward jjones if To contains client2.com and not To contains jemenake forward bsmith ... This worked like a charm! However, I wanted to take myself out of the loop. Now, filter supposedly allows for you to specify a certain rules file with the -f option. So, I tried putting the following in my /etc/aliases file: info:|/usr/bin/filter -f /etc/virt-aliases.filter But this doesn't seem to work (smail and filter are REAL finnicky about permissions and ownerships of files and what UID they're running as). Any ideas or comments? - Joe Well as a customer (actually one of your customers Joe) that uses virtual domains for e-mail, I prefer to have my mail dumped into one mailbox; provided that I have the right information in the mail header to route the message locally. I have several Debian systems running masquerading and diald connected to some of the major ISPs in the Boise, Idaho area. They each support a network of between 6 and 20 Macs and PCs and use virtual domain service for their e-mail service from their ISP. To let the Macs and PCs on the LAN poll for mail whenever they want (without dialing to the ISP every time they want to check for e-mail), I've set up the Debian systems as sort of a mail gateway. All the clients point to the Debian boxes for their SMTP and POP mail servers. For outgoing mail, I run smail on the Debian box setup to relay mail to the ISP's SMTP mail server once every 30 minutes or so. I've seen two different ways ISPs handle incoming mail for virtual domains. The most common method I've seen for handling incoming virtual domain e-mail, is to dump all mail into a single pop account on the ISP's mail server. Unfortunately, I don't believe there is a standard on how to write the mail headers for the incoming mail messages so they can be reliably routed. Without getting into a really long-winded explanation about mail headers and MTAs and sendmail.cf files, to be able to reliably route mail locally from a multi-drop box, the MTA needs to write the SMTP recipient name somewhere in the mail header. The ISPs that I've dealt with generally write the SMTP recipient name in the for field of the Received line and/or in the X-Envelope-To: line. Unfortunately, the ISPs don't always get the recipient name into one of those fields correctly (although Cyberhighway now seems to get the X-Envelope-To: correct all the time). I've been working with the author of fetchmail (which I believe is now the best pop retrieval program going) to make multi-drop mail routing as reliable as possible. With (what I deem) proper configuration of the MTA at the ISP, fetchmail should be able to route mail from a multi-drop mailbox with 100% reliably. (If you'd like to talk about what I think is proper configuration of the MTA for virtual domain support, e-mail me directly) Given the popularity of virtual domain e-mail hosting, there should probably be an RFC for this sort of thing. The other way I've seen an ISP deal with virtual domain hosting for a dial-up account is to assign a static IP address to the dial-up account and then play some tricks with DNS and the MTA to get the mail to its final destination. Basically, the ISP assigns a static IP address to the dial-up account and puts two MX records in their DNS for the mail domain, like: mydomain.com. IN MX 0 mystaticip.myisp.com. mydomain.com. IN MX 10 mailhost.myisp.com. If the link is up when mail comes in, it goes to the right place. If the link is down, the mail will be sent to the ISP's
