Re: authentication of multiple users for one mail server
On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 08:49:28 -0400, brownh wrote:
> Camaleon,
>
> Thanks for your patience, and I seem to have stumbled on my problem:
> emim4 configuration.
>
> Regarding the value for "system mail name", in retrospect it does makes
> sense, but not when I was reading the document you cited. First, if I
> can reconstruct my thinking correctly, I failed to associate the word
> "mailname," which was not explicitly defined, with "domain". If I asked
> someone on the street what their "mailname" is, they would give me their
> email address. I knew that it actually meant domain, but I had to figure
> out from its function that it was not really the "system" name (i.e.,
> the domain of a host on a LAN), but the alternative meaning of domain,
> which unfortunately has no dedicated term such as "internet domain". I
> may be dense and my reading perverse, but it's folks like me that
> manuals are for ;-)
:-)
"system mail name" is indeed a key value for a correct setup of any mail
system. I don't know how is Exim in this respect, but at least in Postfix
(another e-mail server) the name of the host is a critical part for a
correct routing of the messages as well as for applying security
features. Many other variable values depend on this one to get the system
working.
The value of this variable may depend of the nature of your e-mail
server. If you are using it just for your lan you can put here the name
of the computer where Exim is running (I think this is the default, plus
the "dot" extension: ".site") but if you are running a virtual hosting,
this value is usually changed to something more "neutral", like
"smtp.hosting-c.com" or just "hosting-c.com" or any other real,
accessible and routeable domain name.
> In any case, the source of my problem was my adding my domain name to
> the list of recipient domains. Again, in retrospect, I understand why
> this caused exim4 to fail to route a message to another machine that
> happened to have the same domain name before the LAN was set up. Exim4
> naturally looks for the user's of that domain name on its own host or
> local network and, not finding the user, does not by default ultimately
> send the message to my provider's mail server. Instead, it simply gives
> up and returns a routing error message. I guess the assumption is that
> if a person assigns a local domain name to the host, they intend to make
> it part of a LAN, and so instinctively know that until such a LAN is
> actually in place, the local host is not able to send a message to
> another host having the same domain name. My problem was that I tried to
> set up and test email before constructing the LAN.
When something goes wrong, reading mail server logs tends to be very
constructive and gives you a high chance to solve the issue in minutes :-)
One of the firsts test to try when setting up en e-mail server is to run
a telnet session on the local machine (the one running Exim), just with
"telnet localhost 25". If that succeeds, then try the same from another
computer in the lan, changing the "localhost" for the IP address of the
server "telnet 192.168.0.1 25" and check if you get a response from Exim.
Then, you can try with the domain name, the one you used for "system mail
name" and see if you get a response.
Should you get no connection or e-mails are not reaching their
recipients, you have to stop here and read the logs to find out what can
be the cause of this.
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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