RE: [cobalt-developers] Reserved emails - what does Sun think?

["Hosting Sales" <hosting@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bull! It is a limitation of neither Linux nor Sendmail, as the simple
change to the aliases file (which is merely a configuration file used by
Sendmail) illustrates.  It is, in fact, a limitation of the Cobalt GUI.
If you edit the file directly or use other web-based control programs
like Webmin or CPanel, you just don't have this problem.  Moreover, if
you fix the problem by editing the aliases file by any means, your
efforts will be eradicated when you next use the Cobalt GUI to add a
user or adjust any user mail setting that causes the alias file to be
rewritten.

Linux will NOT allow you define a user named admin, or root, or
postmaster, or any of these "reserved" names, not because they are magic
but because they are already taken.  This in no way, however, extends to
mailbox aliases of the form admin@xxxxxxxxxx; this restriction is unique
to the Cobalt GUI.

And the GUI really pukes on this stuff.  Try this one at home, kids.
Create an account (say, joseph), then add several aliases for that
account's mailbox at once (joe@xxxxxxxxxx, joey@xxxxxxxxxx, etc.) and be
sure to include a reserved one, like postmaster@xxxxxxxxxxx  You will
find that a) none of them becomes defined, and b) the GUI issues no
error.  Very nice.

Because we too have clients who use (and have always used) addresses
like admin@xxxxxxxxxx for certain types of mail, we finally abandoned
the Cobalt GUI for user management.  Solved that problem quite nicely.
Still running Linux and Sendmail BTW, neither of which complains.
Considering the Cobalt GUI was intended to make life easier for system
administrators, I wonder why we spend so much of our time finding ways
around its limitations.

Jack

-----Original Message-----
From: cobalt-developers-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cobalt-developers-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andrew
Cudzilo
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 11:17 AM
To: cobalt-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [cobalt-developers] Reserved emails - what does Sun think?


> 1) Are there any more reserved email addresses I should know about (I
only
> discovered the admin@ when clients stopped receiving their mail when
they
> decided to use my services - no a good look)
> 
> 2) Does Sun intend to fix this
> 
> thanks
> gareth
I believe that the reserved email addresses are stored in two files:
/etc/aliases or /etc/mail/aliases and /etc/virtusertable or
/etc/mail/virtusertable (depending on
your product.  Usually, reserved email addresses are admin, root,
sys....etc...

Actually, by modifying /etc/aliases, I believe you can set your own
aliases...but this entails a
bending of the warrenty.

This is more of a limitation of Linux and Sendmail....so I don't figure
Sun will be tackling the
issue anytime soon.  It would be nice however, for Sun to have some
documentation on the subject.

Hope its helped

=====
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