[Mailman-Developers] RE: [Mailman-Users] Virtual Hosts -- can mailman handle them better?

[Ron Jarrell]

This bites people a lot, and should probably be in the faq; hell, I've been doing
dns and sendmail for *years* and *I* periodically forget it's going to happen.

If you're planning on sending mail *from* a host, make sure it's a real
host entry, not an alias.  In DNS terms, verify that it's an A record
pointing at the same ip address as the main host (perfectly valid to
do); do *not* put in a CNAME pointing at it.  Unless someone has
specifically configured sendmail to be set to nocanonify, mail from
cnames will be re-written into the canonical name (that's what cname
stands for), which is not the virtual hostname.  This is also done by
the *receiving* end, so there's nothing you can change on your side,
it must be done in DNS.  This is a stupid default, but was the default
before virtual hosting really caught on.

Most sites that just web virtual host use cnames; add email into the picture
and suddenly nothing works like you expect.


At 07:03 PM 8/17/99 +0200, Harald Meland wrote:
>[Tauren Mills]
>
> > I have set "Host name this list prefers" and it still returns emails
> > with the main domain name in them.
>
>Strange -- this certainly works fine for me, and I can't see any
>site-global configuration settings that could somehow inhibit changes
>done here.  You're sure that it isn't your MTA that's rewriting the
>(header) addresses after Mailman has handed the message over to it?
>
> > > However, if you have several lists with the same localpart name in
> > > different domains (i.e. "foobar@dom1.com" and "foobar@dom2.org"),
> > > you'll have to assign them different Mailman-internal names.
> > 
> > What do you mean by "different Mailman-internal names"?
>
>E.g. the list <mailman-users@python.org> has the Mailman-internal name
>"mailman-users".  Thus, if the Mailman installation at python.org
>housed another domain "example.com" that wanted a list
><mailman-users@example.com>, that list would have to use a different
>Mailman-internal name, e.g. "mailman-users-example.com" -- which would
>result in Mailman-generated messages looking rather messy, with email
>addresses like
>
>   mailman-users-example.com@example.com
>
>all over them...
>
>If the Mailman-internal name was equal to the (preferred) email
>address of the list, there wouldn't be these kind of naming
>collisions.
>
> > But the problem is that the emails that get sent from Mailman would still
> > say "announce2@customerdomain.com" all throughout them, instead of
> > "announce@customerdomain.com".
> > 
> > Would your suggested changes solve this problem?
>
>That is the main motivation for me suggesting it, so yes, I do hope it
>would :)
>
> > Could the newlist command at least include options on the command
> > line for the list's default URL and for the mail domain?
>
>What do others think about this?  I'd really rather solve this once
>and for all with my proposed email-addr-as-internal-name and
>maildomain->base_URL scheme... but if no one but me think that that's
>the way to go, I probably won't bother :)
>
>Besides, I'm kind of swamped with real work right now :(
>-- 
>Harald
>
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