Well, it wasn't that simple after all.  In thinking back using the mail.mydomain.com:xxxx only assured that the users were logging into the master on the mirrored configuration and temporarily masked the problem because the slave in the mirror, which had all the virtual domains, was mail2.mydomain.xxxx

We switched over to the new server Friday might and shut down the master.  Saturday morning NOBODY could get to their webmail (yes, I know we should switch to the surgemail method but I have enough allegators to deal with right now - need this to work first).or their client email.

Part of the answer/solution came from spending some time with the document "Virtual Domains" written by the boys at NetWin.  If we had read this through before the adventure there would have been less pain.  Anyone going there in the future will find that using the g_server_name for all the domains you want to allow to log in and see their own domains is a key piece.  So that solved the webmail login issue. It seems.

BUT it appears perhaps nothing will solve the issue of client logins allowing the users to use JUST their email account name (John for John@awasco.com for example) without the domain to log in using pop3.  And, again the "Virtual Domains" pretty much tells us that in the first paragraph with "Fake ones (virtual domains), where you only use a single IP address, then the user must login as 'user@domain.name' when fetching their Email via POP so that the server can figure out which domain they belong to.

Sadly, there is some sense in this.  We tried IP addresses in the Virtual Domain IP field, but this destroys the webmail since the first domain found in surgmail.ini is the one displayed for login and is the only domain one can login on properly. 

If anyone has found a way around this problem that will give surgemail the id of the domain logging in on POP3 in a virtual domain configuration, I would love to hear from you.

A couple of things I spotted in the process as an aside..

We have two IP addresses we separated our virtual domains between.  No particular reason except we had the IPS and wanted to split them.  All the domains on the first IP, when they log in were sent to the first vdomain entry in the surgemail.ini file with that IP address.  That is in the login it showed that as the login domain and the only way to get by this was to enter a fully qualified email address i.e. john@yourdomain.com as the userid.  And the rest were sent to the first vdomain in the suregmail.ini for the second IP address.  The big question is why was webmail not matching up the domain name rather than stopping at the first ip match found?  It certainly seems to have some bit of the domain when it used g_server_name to resolve this. 

I also took a look at the surgehost.ini in web_work and discovered that it contains a number of domains that are long gone or clearly had names that someone had corrected and re-saved.  Probably surgemail treated them as a new domain and left the other in place.  The REALLY curious bit here is that most of these somehow inherited the new IP addresses that were never attached to them in the first place.

Yes, surgemail has been stopped and restarted.  Seveal times.


On 1/4/2013 11:08 AM, Orin Wells wrote:

Sometimes it turns out that it is actually "THAT SIMPLE".  The key seems to be not to use the basic URL (http://myserver.com:xxxx) as we have always done in the past with specific IP addresses, but mail.myserver.com:xxxx

That seems to solve the problem.

Thanks for the nudge.

I did back off and try the Mail Host A Record, but that did not seem to make any difference if I tried to connect with the basic URL.

Thanks again.

On 1/4/2013 10:38 AM, Lyle Giese wrote:

On 1/4/2013 12:03 PM, Orin Wells wrote:

We just had to change server locations and were forced into using virtual domains rather than dedicated IP addresses.  We don't have a lot of customers who use the old webmail, but it only takes a couple to reveal a problem I have not been able to figure out a solution for.  The g_webmail_port only provides one port for the server for webmail.  All the domains on a particular IP address thus seem to be coming in with the wrong domain except anyone who is on that particular domain and I have no idea why it defaults to that domain.

So when someone goes to login from myserver.com:xxxx they see the window showingHIDDEN@main.com and are unable to log in because THEY are not users on hisdomain.com

I can't find any way to separate this nor to assign specific ports for each domain, if that is possible.

Does anyone have  a solution to this?

We have one bunch of domains set to one address and another bunch set to another just to split them out and not have everyone pile onto the same IP at once when sending/receiving email.

Please, does someone have an answer to this?

Is URL host set for these domains?   In the web admin, under the domain Settings for the domain, 'Mail host A record name', I setup mail.<thisdomain>.com for each domain and instructed users to go to http://mail.<thisdomain>.com

I would not assign ports.  Leave everything on port 80.

There is also a file called surgehost.ini that has an effect on this.  I don't have access to my notes other than I seem to remember a tellmail command to rebuild surgehost.ini file.

Lyle Giese
LCR Computer Services, Inc.