Re: [cobalt-users] [Raq4] Email nightmares

["Chris Bell" <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

OK,

Thanks for your replies despite this being a very dated/tired subject. I
swear if I ever figure out how this box is thinking I'll write the FAQ
myself (it's a Raq4i btw).

Now I SWEAR I tried this combination last night, but hey, nothing like a
good night's sleep for fixing a technical glitch. If anyone's looking for an
answer please read below.

Firstly this is how my DNS is configured:

foo.com    IN A    <my IP address>
foo.com    IN MX    mail.foo.com
www.foo.com    IN A    <my IP address>
www.foo.com    IN MX    mail.foo.com
mail.foo.com    IN A    <my IP address>

The general advice has been to add an MX record for the www hostname. Why,
I'm not sure yet. I also have unresolved requests forwarding to <my IP
address>.

This is how I configured my server:

Host name:    www
Domain name:    foo.com
Web server aliases: foo.com
Mail server aliases: foo.com, mail.foo.com

User name: cbell
Email alias: @www.foo.com

There were a few interesting variations on this configuration which could
shed light on the situation but I'll avoid going into them now. Now it
appears that I only need the "foo.com" mail server alias in order to receive
mail @foo.com, and the email alias above picks up all the stray mail (I am
yet to confirm that it doesn't override all other aliases, another problem
I've read about). However, I've added the mail.foo.com email server alias in
order to be able to receive mail @mail.foo.com, as I've come across a few
clients (especially webmail) in the past that seem to use name@xxxxxxxxxxxx
as the from address. It looks like because mail.foo.com doesn't have an MX
record I need to add it here whereas the others seem OK?

Anyway, this configuration seems to work and would be standard where you're
hosting a web site and email. However I want to host email and a webmail
site located at mail.foo.com, so I'm going to try changing the host name to
"mail" and see how much further trauma I can put myself through.

By the way, I wasn't very impressed by the "knowledge base" on the Cobalt
site in terms of how it dealt with email issues. Not very comprehensive and
somewhat simplistic imho.

Regs

cb