Phillip,
I just converted a sendmail server that had 48 hosts aliases. These aliases
were all sub domains of the main domain but here is how I got around the
limitation. I don't know if this will work for you or not.
Here is the whole story. I would just like to start by saying that this is
in no way how I would have desired to configure this system but it was an
ugly necessity to get these users off of the crapy sendmail system they were
on. Basically I have an IMail server configured as host mail.mydomain.com
with a host alias for mydomain.com. On the sendmail system there also
existed 48 host aliases for sub domains such as ant.mydomain.com. These
host aliases work just the same as host aliases in IMail. The killer
limitation that I ran into is that you can only have 25 host aliases with a
max length of 255 characters on IMail. To get around this I stumbled across
the following oddity with IMail. If I point the MX for ant.mydomain.com to
the host mail.mydomain.com the server will receive mail for
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Actually it does not accept it for delivery at first
but accepts the message for relay. When IMail goes to relay the message it
does an MX lookup for ant.mydomain.com and receives direction back to it's
self. I am theorizing that for some reason this prompts it do a local
delivery with mydomain.com. At any rate that's what happens. The problem
here is that host mail.mydomain.com must first accept the message for relay.
Unless you want to open your system as an wide open relay you have another
hurdle to cross. To get around this issue I setup a sendmail system to
receive mail for ant.mydomain.com. I then pointed the MX for
ant.mydomain.com to relay.relaysystem.com. You can configure sendmail in
such a way as to have it "route" mail based on domain with out doing an MX
lookup. Thus mail would come in from the Internet to the relay system and
then be routed to the IMail box. I then only had to add the IP address of
the relay system to the allow table on the IMail system. But I now had
another problem. I had changed the MX record for ant.mydomain.com to point
to the relay system and not directly to the IMail system. This broke the
functionality of IMail relaying messages for [EMAIL PROTECTED] back to
its self. To fix this I had to tweak the DNS host that IMail uses for
lookups. I had to make that host report back that the MX for
ant.mydomain.com directed to mail.mydomain.com. Obviously this DNS host can
not be the same host that the rest of the world looks to for MX records for
ant.mydomain.com or you break the whole thing over again. As you can see
this is very elaborate and not a preferred way of configuring a mail system.
If this helps anyone out - Great. If I had my way I would ask that IMail
expand the capability to allow at least a greater number of host aliases (50
aliases with 1000 character max). In a perfect world I would ask for
unlimited host aliases configured in a text file. Perhaps hostaliases.txt.
Jeff
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Phillip
Rexinger
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 1:36 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] Limit on the Alias field
I am also faced with this problem... it's rather urgent that we find a
work-around. I have around 50 domains that all use the same server!
If we can't find a work around... I don't think we can use this mail
server...
Phillip Rexinger
www.adamsbusinessmedia.com
Director, Internet Operations
68-860 Perez Road
Cathedral City, CA 92234
760.770.4370
760.770.2797 FAX
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martha Flugstad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 9:01 AM
Subject: [IMail Forum] Limit on the Alias field
> Hello everyone,
> We are in the process of converting our mail system from 22 Novell
> servers to one IMail server. We have converted thirteen servers so far.
> At the time that we converted the first server, the only way we could find
> to allow incoming mail to the old server name was to enter that name as an
> alias for the IMail server. And, only the fully qualified host name would
> work. That is, we had to enter hostname.domainname.edu. When we
converted
> the thirteenth server this week, we reached the 255 character limit on the
> alias field. We found a workaround by removing a server name that had
never
> been officially used for mail, but we will be in trouble next week if we
> don't find a solution to this. We had originally thought that if we had a
> CNAME record in the DNS for the Novell servers that this would be
adequate.
> We do have these CNAME records in the DNS and we are able to send mail
> locally with no problem even to the server that is not listed as an alias.
> However, sending from a account on hotmail.com fails with the message "550
> not a local host, not a gateway" unless we have the fully qualified
hostname
> in the alias field. Does anyone know what to do about this? Thanks for
> your help.
>
> Martha Flugstad
>
>
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