virtual hosts

["Chris Evans" <chris@psyctc.sghms.ac.uk>]

I am currently using Smartlist on Debian to run some small open 
and very small closed lists.  I am also running Apache and wu-ftpd 
to serve http and ftp.  I like the whole combination very much now 
I've learned to configure it properly (wry grin!)  

I am planning to move everything to a machine hosted by an ISP to 
get out of working from within the educational system.  I know that 
for my WWW services I can alias names to the same machine and 
Apache's virtual host capability will present different WWW 
directory trees depending on the browser depending on which 
name has been accessed.  The ISP suggests mapping the various 
different host names to the different IP addresses all on the same 
machine.  The tech man there tells me that gets round the problem 
of older browsers coming in to the numeric address and so hitting 
the www root rather than the virtual mappings.  Sounds good to me 
and I assume you just have multiple entries in /etc/hosts.

Can I do something similar with Email?  In particular with 
Smartlist?  Is there something I can do using sendmail.cf and 
perhaps MX records to allow the same box to collect for different 
names and allow procmail, sendmail, smartlist, qpopper and 
probably some IMAP server to treat the different names 
appropriately?  

I.e. could I have a /var/list set of subdirectories:
	aft
	atc
	sign-speak 
	visped 
	spruk
being served to the addresses:
	aft@aft.psyctc.org 
	atc@atc.psyctc.org 
	visped@visped.org 
	spruk@spruk.psyctc.org

I'm assuming I could be sensible to create unique usernames like:
	aft.person1 aft.person2
	atc.person1 atc.person2
etc.
so there should be no problems of username resolution for 
sendmail, IMAP and POP3.

Have I got the right idea?  What friendly documentation should I be 
reading?

TIA,

Chris


Chris Evans, R&D Consultant,
Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust