On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Jerome Bullert wrote:
> Most mail users are not used to entering the fully qualified email
> address as the "username", when they've been taught that the "username"
> is that portion of the email address before the "@" sign, and the server
> name is that portion after the "@" sign. This is reinforced by support
> teams, sign-in instructions, and FAQs from AOL to Yahoo to Netscape Mail
> to workplace systems and so on. This is what users are taught.
Just a note -- with my home e-mail address, I did exactly this
when I first signed up. Unless you explicitly note this on your sign-in
instructions, people will do the wrong thing.
On the other hand, I worked support for about a year, and I had
people make the opposite mistake -- putting in their full e-mail address
as a username. Basically, whatever you do, you're going to need to
educate your users, preferably being specific in the signup instructions,
and also supplying the correct settings on your signup CD (or whatever).
An error message at the appropriate place in the POP/IMAP login might not
be a bad idea either :).
> What you're saying is that, even though I configure my email client to
> connect to "domain.com" (or "mail.domain.com"), the IMAP and POP servers
> don't know that *they are* "domain.com" (or "mail.domain.com"). Is this
> correct?
That's right! You need to investigate DNS to understand this
properly, but basically, it is your computer's responsibility to turn the
names into IP addresses before it sends the information, so that the
Internet knows where to send it. So, as someone said, if you assigned
each domain a different IP address, you should be able to get the POP/IMAP
server to default to a different domain. But you might have to write a
patch for courier to do that (not sure :) ).
> My apologies if this is a stupid question. I'm not a mail expert (yet).
> But I am a Support expert that knows how users behave in the real world.
Just for those on the list who may not have worked in support, let
me summarise: dead stupid :).
> And I know that a single "level of separation" can result in a major
> increase or decrease in both usability and support time/costs.
I personally would expect that the full e-mail address scenario
would be getting a lot more common in the future, as more and more people
are hosting multiple domains from the one box. It's something that we're
looking at here (with 2000 users, it will be a big changeover, but I think
we'll change a whole bunch of things at once -- IE -> Mozilla, and Mail
with AUTH, SSL, and full domain names, new proxy (and DNS) settings, the
works).
:)
--
Tim Nelson
Systems Administrator
Sunet Internet
Tel:�+61 3 5241 1155
Fax: +61 3 5241 6187
Web: http://www.sunet.com.au/
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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