Re: Domain Problem

[Charles Ying <cying@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is one of the biggest source of confusion for installing or 
upgrading PO. I bitched about this every chance I get but kept 
getting put down by Unix geeks who seem to imply that every unix 
person should know this stuff. And, of course, Post.Office has to 
work this way.

Now that I have installed and used several other OS X mail servers, I 
am not afraid to say that NO, it is not necessary to have this 
"what-is-my-hostname guessing game" in order to have a working POP 
and SMTP server.

My gripe is Post.Office never documented how and where they get host 
info and how it is used (in a flow chart kind of way). We know if you 
set hostname to Apple's default of "-AUTOMATIC-" that Post.Office 
will somehow get your PTR record, which, for many of us not leasing 
an entire Class C subnet is something ugly like 
bdsl.66.14.250.23.verizon.net. If we changed it to mydomain.com or 
mail.mydomain.com in hostconfig, things seem to work but sometimes, 
Post.office appends some string like domain.com or root@xxxxxxxxxx to 
the end of the Postmaster account email address when you launch the 
Post.Office app which you are told to launch after an install, but is 
not clear if you need to launch after an update. It is also not clear 
if this field appears corrupted whether it matters or not.

Then, there is the field in the web form that does "auto-completion". 
That is also a place where you are supposed to enter almost the same 
information, namely "domain.com" or mail.domain.com" but is not clear 
which one you should use. The same as your hostname entry or same as 
the Postmaster address you enter in the Post.Office app? My mail 
server hostname is mail.domain.com. But my postmaster account name is 
postmaster@xxxxxxxxxxx If I try to log in as 
postmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, PO refuses to let me log in. So I have to 
change my auto-complete to domain.com so as not to have to always 
have to delete the mail. before I log in each time.

Anyway, it is clear that the system admin is asked to enter redundant 
information because if you are not consistent, PO gives you this 
terrible error message when you hit done in the Post.Office App. When 
you are lucky and did it right, you get this congratulation message 
as if you just won the jackpot.

It seems to me that as long as we have to run the Post.Office App 
anyway when we install the server, why not take the user entered info 
as to the name of the server and use it as the "hostname" as far as 
PO is concerned. PO can use the OSX hostname to populate this field 
initially, but the Admin can override it if he or she doesn't like to 
use the record in the PTR of the zone file for that IP address. And 
if we mapped mail.domain.com to domain.com in our mail routing 
settings, shouldn't the login code allow us to log in either as 
postmaster@xxxxxxxxxx or postmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?

Whatever PO does, I have a feeling nobody at Tenon really knows or we 
would have been given some authoritative clarifications on this 
matter.

I hope Tenon either fixes this or document exactly what PO expects 
you to enter rather than forcing us to do trial-n-error to make the 
Postmaster account field come out right in the Post.Office App.

Charles


At 3:42 PM -0500 6/10/03, Bill Lamb wrote:
> I just installed the latest version on OS X Server 10.2.5. Everything went
> fine, but I have a strange domain problem.
>
> My postmaster account is now listed as: postmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> When I attempt to change that in the Web interface (Primary E-mail Address),
> I get:
>
> >  An error occurred when processing one of the fields on this form:
> >  Account-Manager/HTML-Range-Error/Accounts/SMTP-AddressPMReq
> >  Please correct the field and try again.
>
> Not all receiving mail servers like this, I don't think.
>
> How do I correct this?
>
> Any ideas appreciated.
>
> --
> B I L L   L A M B   |   blamb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
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