Re: [webmin-l] Virtual E-Mails With Virtualmin

[Kris D. <kd...@vi...>]

Conrad Decker wrote:
> Ok..here's a question for you. Platform - Red Hat 7.2.

Eeep!  RH7.2 hasn't had *any* security support (much less "fix important
bugs" support) that I know of for about three years now.  You should
*really* look into upgrading to something that still has some form of
security support.

> Here's how I see it. There are three ways to handle virtual e-mails, you
> can store a users e-mail (deliver it to their mailbox), you can forward
> a users e-mail (deliver it to someone elses mailbox), or you can do both
> of these (deliver it to their mailbox as well as someone elses). In
> virtualmin, if I create a user to just accept e-mail there's no problem.
> In addition, if I want it to act as an alias to one other e-mail
> address, I realize I can manage that via "Mail Aliases". However, if I
> want it to act as an alias to multiple other e-mail addresses it gets a
> little complicated. Under "Mail Aliases" it now has alias desitinations
> as "user-domain.com" and it creates an alias in the /etc/aliases file.
> This makes sense...however, if there are two or three e-mail addresses
> that we're supposed to be forwarding mail to there's no way to modify
> them as the only thing that shows up is the alias to "user-domain.com".
> If I clear this field out and put in e-mail addresses again it just does
> the same thing and makes another entry in /etc/aliases like before. I'm
> now looking at three alias records in /etc/aliases.

I'm not quite clear on what you're seeing here, can you show excerpts
from your aliases file?  Can you give any examples of what you think
needs to be added instead of or in addition to what's already being entered?

Secondly, which MTA are you using?  That may affect the order in which
destination email addresses are expanded through aliases and other
virtual user tables.

> Wow...I realize this might not make much sense, but I guess my question
> is...what's the best way to handle setting up an e-mail address to act
> as an alias to multiple other e-mails? Anybody have any recommendations?

Currently, I'd write some custom code for MIMEDefang (a sendmail milter)
to do a hash table lookup on the original destination address, expand as
needed, and rewrite the list of "real" destination addresses.  <g>  It
would take about 10 minutes to write, and half a day to fix my
inevitable boneheaded mistakes.  ;)

Figuring out how to present this in a web-based admin interface would
probably take longer than the functional code.

-kgd