Hi,

I hope you all have the best start to a new year.
I was wondering about the email aliases created along with catch all acount. What I have done is to first create a catch all account and then create accounts for each alias. But it seems like all emails go to the catch all acount. Is this because I created the catch all account first? If so this means I have to remove that account and add a new alias and then add catch all again every time I want to add a new alias!

Saeed

actually, i was wondering this myself. in the site settings, if you put in a catch all and some aliases, all emails goto the catch all. can someone tell me what that box for aliases do? also, if you create 3 users for a virtual site, how do they create email forwarders? like:

abc@domain.com -> abcd@domain.edu

i couldnt figure a way to do this without editing the aliases file then running newaliases.

There is no way to do this efficiently with Cobalt's GUI. You have to modify the files by hand or forget about it :)

How do I edit the alias files? Where are they?

oh man, i have to edit it manually? that sucks...what if i had like 200 sites like some people and everyone wanted forwarding?

anyway, zolbian, the file is /etc/aliases

after you mod it, run newaliases - i suggest you check out the cobalt archives for more info on that.

i have another question about the email on the raqs and would appreciate it if someone explains it to me:

1) in the site management section, under user management and the email button, i under stand the first line is for catch all email. what does the email aliases do..i put in a few things in there but what exactly does that do?

2) now under personal profile, then the email menu, the only thing to edit is the catch all. so basically if i put in something there, all email will not be saved on the pop server. the question is, if i wanted to create more pop accounts, i would have to create more users for the virtual site in the site management section correct? So basically if i say a package comes with 100 pop emails, i have to set the virtual site with 100 users and atleast 100+ megabytes of disk space. In the end, there really is either 100 pops or 100 forwards. If I claim unlimited forwarding, then I would have to edit the aliases file myself and add it for the client...

I hope someone can clarify this for me..Thanks in advance.

First, lets go back a bit and understand what you are doing by creating a USER within a domain. If you create a user, say 'jimmy' for the domain doodle.com, mail addressed to jimmy@doodle.com will arrive in this box to be collected via your email program.

Mail sent to 'jikky@doodle.com' (a typo), will be bounced back to the sender.

1) The first line is NOT for catch-all. The first line, "Forward Email To", is exactly what it says. You can forward mail sent to this USER box to anywhere INSTEAD of collecting it with your email program by loggin into the POP account, etc.

You have two options. You can just put *another* USER box that is set up on the server, say 'suzie', which will forward all mail sent to 'jimmy@doodle.com' to the POP box 'suzie' (on the server), or you can put an entire email address (something like 'suzie23@aol.com', or 'suzie@otherdomain.com').

The second area, Email Aliases, is the place where you'd set up your catch-all. To set up a catch-all, simply type in '@www.doodle.com' (note that I included the 'www'). This is because you can set up subdomains and have catch-alls for them too (possibly), so you want to include the host name as well here. This will set it up so that 'anything@doodle.com' is caught and put into the POP box 'jimmy'.

You can also put single words here instead (no need to put a catch-all *and* single words here since the catch-all will take care of everything). Put 'billyjoejimbob' in the alias box. This way, any email addressed to 'jimmy@doodle.com' or 'billyjoejimbob@doodle.com' will end up in the POP box 'billy'. The forwarding function works with this, so both might be forwarded somewhere else *if* you've set up forwarding above.

What you can't do: Set up different aliases on ONE USER and have them forwarded to different places. You'd have to set up another user and forward it.

I hope this clears it up a bit for you...

Hmm,

I still don't get how you can setup different aliases that forward to i.e. mail-1@domain.com and have a catch all that forwards to mail-2@domain.com.

What I have done is to create 2 users. First one is @mydomain.com and it forwards to mail-2@domain.com. The second one is a few aliases that forward to mail-1@domain.com. The problem is that the catch all account actually catches all emails, even those I have aliases for!

Saeed

ah ok..i'll have to re-read your post again. thanks for your indepth post. i'm sure it has clarified it for many as well. all these "southern" names are confusing the hell out of me. i think it was because i watched too much varsity blues. anyway...

let's say i create an account for a friend, http://www.jimbo.com. and give him 100 megs disk space and 5 user accounts. so he creates pop boxes 1@jimbo, 2@jimbo, 3@jimbo...and so on. So my friend wants to create an account for him mom...mom@jimbo.com to be forwarded to mom@college.edu. Once he used up his 5 accounts, theres really nothing to do right? So my options are then, give him one more user or edit the aliases file. But editing the aliases file is just the "same" as making another user so I might as well just give him one more user account.

one other thing..i disabled telnet and setup ssh. if i give jimbo.com 5 user accounts, 1 being the site admin... i want to restrict shell access for the other 4 users. i know you can restrict the siteadmin to shell access and the siteadmin can restrict the users to shell acess. is there a way to totally restrict shell access for users other than the siteadmin I assign to each domain? If I host lets say 20 domains each with 5 user accounts, one being siteadmin for each domain, in essence, the siteadmins can make shell accounts for all their users which I dont want

zolbian-
Do you have ICQ by chance? If so I can take a look at what you have set up, and see if it is correct. Just from reading your post, it is confused. I know you haven't set up a user '@domain.com'.

Like I said, I can take a look if you like while you explain what you want. I also have AOL IM.

teck-
Just make it easy on yourself and give them 10 user accounts to play with, or at least enough so that they won't bug you. Yeah, you'll have to give them one more so they can set up an additional user and then forward it.

Also with the telnet, I believe you either enable it for the site or not, and I believe the siteadmin then could give out shell access.

i see..so by giving the siteadmin shell access, he can then give other users in his domain shell access too...what a bummer. i guess i have to start policing :)

I *believe* so. Honestly, I don't give out shell access, so really I can't quite remember. But I know if you enable it for the site, the siteadmin can create other users (or abusers, heh).

teck,

why don't you just setup your accounts with phpMyAdmin!? That way they won't need shell access for anything since they can edit their mysql from the web as well!

Just a thought,
Saeed

Chicken,

I just send an email to you with a screenshot of my email admin page.

Saeed

Ok, thanks to Mr. Chicken the problem is solved now. I thought I share with you all what was wrong.

The reason the aliased were not working and all emails were captured by the catch-all email was becuause I did not have http://www. in the catch all account. I had it as @domain.com instead of @www.domain.com. As soon as I changed it, everything was working perfectly!

Saeed

lets say i create a site with 5 users, 1 being the siteadmin. if the siteadmin puts @www.domain.com in the aliases and for forwarding, puts user@crapola.com. basically, anything@domain.com will goto user@crapola.com right? now what if the other 4 users setup some aliases/forwarding for their user accounts...i assume your catch all will not get their email right? otherwise, that would defeat the purpose of the user accounts.

Users cannot set up aliases. Only the siteadmin can. And yes, the catch-all only catches email *other* than whatever else you've set up.

sorry to dig this out of the grave but i'm having trouble here. i created a vsite, abc.com. i setup a user for it, made it siteadmin and setup catchall, @www.abc.com. i also set up forwarding to one of my other boxes (user@blah.edu). everything is fine and dandy but when i send something to admin@abc.com, it goes to my main admin box on my raq (the default one) and doesn't go to user@blah.edu.

i cant figure this out :(

One side note: if you are forwarding to a box on the server, I'd just put the box name and not the whole email address. In other words, just 'user', not 'user@domain.com'. This is how I've always done it and although I can't quite recall if I've done it on a RaQ specifically, this is how I've done it on every other linux box.

Ok, try sending an email to: admin@www.abc.com

If it ends up in your 'user' box, then you didn't DNS the domain correctly or didn't check the box when you set up the vsite for accepting email for domain with and without http://www.

Guesses, but strong guesses.

main admin account gets it. i have the forwarding set to my university account so the user by itself shouldnt matter. i cant figure out whats wrong. the vsite even has its own ip... wierd. maybe i'll ask on cobalt list.

I am having that same problem how do you fix that?

not sure yet

I think I figured it out.

In your DNS Setting make sure your MX records are as follows

Host Name: (nothing)
Domain Name: domain.com
Mail Server Name: http://www.domain.com (or domain.com)
Delivery Precedence: (what ever you want)

Under the site management goto the site setting.
Make sure that "Accept Email for Domain" is checked.
Thats all I did and it worked.

Let me know if it works for you

Just an update I notice that it works for all email that is not pointed to admin and postmaster there might be a few more I am still testing.