At 7:53 PM -0700 9/9/02, Geoff Canyon imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
>So the question is: why isn't the domain itself sufficient to >differentiate the two accounts? > >It sounds as though on the SMTP end, it is: mail comes in for >[EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED], and the SMTP server knows >enough to store the mail separately based on the different domains. > >But the POP3 server doesn't have access to that information? >[EMAIL PROTECTED] logs in to get his email, and the POP3 server >doesn't have any way of knowing whether is fred from firstdom.com or >fred from seconddom.com? Because the design of POP3 is that the user logs in with an account name, not an email address. Traditionally this meant you used the 'local part' of your email address to log into a server that handled a single domain. This model has changed somewhat with POP3 servers that handle mailboxes whose addresses are in different domains, but there are still many POP3 servers that can't handle an @ in the account name used to log in and many multi-domain mail systems that map all the mail domains into a single flat POP3 namespace, just as SIMS does. A few have moved to POP3 namespaces that mirror the mail address namespace and require user@domain logins, but that's not extremely common It would be nice to see SIMS work a little more automatically with multiple domains, perhaps by pushing POP3 login names through the router so that users could log in with their email addresses (whichever working one they like) and get the right mailbox. It doesn't really strike me as a priority issue (I'd rather see a release version of 1.8 and complete current docs) but it sure does generate traffic here. -- Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED] ############################################################# This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the INDEX mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
