Re: [courier-users] RE: distinct namespace with userdb ? (Feature Request)

[Jerome Bullert]

Systems Administrator wrote: 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 :). True. There will always be users that do the wrong thing. I just try to make things intuitive for the greatest majority, which leaves fewer that need more detailed instructions or hand-holding. And you're right about educating the user, signup instructions, and good error messages. 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 :) ). Thanks. I get the DNS component. I guess I just made the (wrong) assumption that, since the server name is configured in both the email client and in courier (hosteddomains), somewhere during the connection/log in process that information would pass between the two. Just to elaborate on yours and Gordon's comments: Using hosted domains (a single IP address), you couldn't make my suggestion work by modifications to courier alone. Even if you somehow added functionality similar to Apache's VirtualHost directives, it wouldn't work because the email client never passes the server name to the IMAP or POP server the way that a browser does to the http server But your suggestion to do this based on static IPs for each domain is a good one. This might even be a worthwhile enhancement to courier, especially since static IPs are more common in commercial environments, which are the same environments in which you want the highest level of usability and professional appearances. I'd suggest this myself but, as you know, my last feature/enhancement request went bad, mostly due to my lack of understanding of the subject matter. If any of you coders out there (I'm not, yet) think this functionality would be worthwhile, I'd be happy to help however I can. 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). :) You might be right on this for independent ISPs, but it's unlikely to happen with AOL, Yahoo, etc. They invest a lot of time and effort to get people addicted to "screen names". In fact, unless they've changed something recently, you can use your AOL screen name across all of the AOL brands. (AOL, Netscape, Compuserve, etc.) You can use all of these services, signing in with the same screen name, and have a different email address for each. Plus, imagine the engineering work to modify their registration/authentication systems to recognize "screenname", "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", and "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", etc, as the same username. Anyway, thanks to those who responded for the input and feedback (and for only gently slapping me down). And, as we say way up here in the mountains: "Thanks for learning me some stuff." Jerome -- Jerome Bullert [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----------------------------