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

[Conrad D. <co...@cd...>]

Kris Deugau wrote:
> 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.
>   
Ah....well that's good to know. Wasn't aware.
>> 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?
>   
Yeah, I figured that might be a little confusing. Basically when I add 
one or more e-mail addresses as aliases...lets say it's for the user 
jo...@no... and I want to create an alias on that e-mail address to 
go to jd...@so... and do...@so.... If I do this in 
virtualmin it creates an alias john-nowhere.com: 
jd...@so...,do...@so.... in the /etc/aliases file. 
This makes sense, and I understand what it's doing...however a less 
technical person who is managing aliases in Virtualmin now sees only one 
alias and it's setup as an alias to john-nowhere.com...rather then 
listing the two e-mail addresses that it's going to. What I would expect 
to see is something more like the screen that you see in the Webmin 
Sendmail module where you can edit aliases..you actually see which 
e-mail addresses are setup to be forwarded to and can modify them. I 
guess I can set the user up with access to that module, but I was hoping 
to keep everything in the Virtualmin module.
> 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.
>   
Using Sendmail
>   
>> 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.  ;)
>   
The problem isn't necessarily that sendmail isn't handling it correctly, 
in fact, it's handling it perfectly. The problem is from the managment 
perspective, Virtualmin doesn't make it easy to manage those aliases.