Hosting Multiple Domains on a Mail server...

[jdvilla]

I have been maintaining a web server for my company for a few months. I do everything via a graphical administration tool (when it comes to creating new mail users) which has made things fairly easy for me.

However,

We have just decided to host 3 other domains on our servers. I need some direction as to the feasibility of this:

Each domain will have some of the same addresses e.g.

info@domain1.com - info@domain2.com - info@domain3.com contact@domain1.com - contact@domain2.com - info@domain3.com sales@domain1.com - sales@domain2.com - sales@domain3.com

Currently, our default domain already has those addresses and they are actual user accounts on our servers. The other domains wish to have the same setup and be able to keep the mail on our server. So I'm not looking to create accounts which just forward to hotmail or yahoo accounts, but real accounts such as POP3 or IMAP.

The current problem is that using the admin tool I have been using, this is not possible because the users info, contact, and sales already exist. Moreover, the mail server is set up to receive mail at any one of our domains and if I send an email to info@domain1.com it will go to the info@defaultdomain.com, unless I make it a forwarding address (which will just forward to another mail server).

My proposed solution is to create accounts for everyone on our server, including hosted domains, in order to make it possible for everyone to use POP3.

An example is virtual hosting with web documents. Every virtual domain has their own physical directory.

I have read the information on sendmail.org as well as some other places. I have not been able to find an answer. I thought of purchasing the Sendmail book but I read the reviews and while it is praised as an awesome book, it also states that it is not beginners. I would fall under the latter category and, honestly, am intimidated.

What I am looking for is ideally an detailed answer but I know you must get flooded with requests, so a simple,

1. Can't be done
2. It can be done, check out this website
3. It can be done, buy the book.

[blizz]

Hi,

Sure it can be done. You mention "I do everything via a graphical administration tool." You might want to take a look at webmin. It provides a great graphical interface for managing sendmail accounts, qmail accounts and others. http://www.webmin.com

"My proposed solution is to create accounts for everyone on our server, including hosted domains, in order to make it possible for everyone to use POP3."

Well you don't really need to create accounts for everyone on your server, however in order to set up pop3 accounts for each hosted domain you must set up accounts for users that will receive mail at each domain unless you use forwarding.

To better explain using webmin:
Example:
We could configure the server to receive email to the following domain:

domain5.com

Then, we would set up users who are to receive this email on the local system.

Steve
Chris
Tina

Those three users are associated with the above domains in different ways. So give each person a responsibility......

Steve:
He is to receive email concerning sales on the domain5.com, so we give him the email address: sales@domain5.com
Chris:
Is the owner of the company, and only answers email from his personal friends, so we give him: chris@domain5.com
Tina:
Is the technical person, she is to get ALL other email to the domain domain5.com so by default she gets ALL other addressed email. (feedback, info, whatever) Her email address is special in that it is "Wild Carded" which means she will get any email addressed to the domain5.com domain that has not been specifically assigned to another user.
This is her "Internal" email address: @domain5.com

How to set it up:

First- Add the users you wish to have email services to your server Give username and password.
In our example above:
adduser chris
passwd chris
adduser tina
passwd tina
adduser steve
passwd steve
.... Would be the command sequence.

Second - Open webmin (sendmail.cw) Add the domain: domain5.com to this file.

Third - Edit /etc/mail/virtusertable Add the following email address to username map to this file:

sales@domain5.com steve
chris@domain5.com chris
@domain5.com tina

That's it, to add more domains, repeat the following steps appending new information to each file.

[jdvilla]

Ok,

but what if their is a user named steve for domain5 and domain6 also has someone with a name of steve they want to host. Will I have to tell the new steve that he has to choose a different username because someone else with on a different domain already has his username.

I'm looking to set up POP3 for steve@domain5, and steve@domain6

[blizz]

"Will I have to tell the new steve that he has to choose a different username because someone else with on a different domain already has his username?"

YES

You will still be able to set-up POP3 for steve@domain5, and steve@domain6 this way.

steve@domain5 steve

steve@domain6 steve1

[jdvilla]

Thanks....

I was just thinking about that....

I thought to myself that not every mail account will be accessing server files, most will only need an email address... So I thought, "why not create a different server username and just point the mail to that new user....