Why is this all such a mess?

by Posted on

OK, at my com­pa­ny we have five employ­ees. That’s total, includ­ing the owner.

We have some­where around a hun­dred Inter­net domains.

So why do we have to have dif­fer­ent rules for EVERY DOMAIN????

My tourcorp.com address is “steve” and my mapwest.com address is “s” and my gotoalcatraz.com address is “splicer.”

I’m cool with that and cool with hav­ing mul­ti­ple alias­es for the same mail­box. What I don’t under­stand is hav­ing to main­tain one hun­dred mail­box­es or even one hun­dred sep­a­rate alias­es just for “sales@whatever.com”

We have five peo­ple here. This should be simple.

If we had a sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor to set poli­cies and so on, I could yell at him or her. But of course if we had a sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor here, we would­n’t have this stuff com­ing up in the first place.

Published by splicer

5 Replies to “Why is this all such a mess?”

  2. Yeah, that’s what *I*
    Yeah, that’s what *I* think.

    Of course, there’s no vir­tu­al user table. This is a pro­pri­etary NT4-based mailserv­er and – get this – it’s nev­er ever had a routable IP address, no MX records have ever point­ed to it.

    They’ve relied on mul­ti­POP. This means for each of the 100+ domains, there’s a POP mail­box. All the mail for the domain goes into one mail­box, and then the mailserv­er goes and grabs mail for each one.

    So at this point, dif­fer­ent rules go into place depend­ing on which POP account it was grabbed from. I’ve been pay­ing as lit­tle atten­tion as I pos­si­bly can to the NT mailserv­er, but it appears to define a mail­box as a user­name plus a domain, not as a single 

    Right now I’ve got all the DNS point­ed at a sin­gle serv­er, but the MX record can’t go to the actu­al mailserv­er because we don’t have a real IP address for it. So I’m fil­ter­ing every­thing into one mail­box and hav­ing the mailserv­er grab all this stuff via POP and then split it off into the dif­fer­ent mail accounts. sales@domain1.com.…sales@domain100.com appa­rant­ly requires 100 dif­fer­ent “rules”.

    The prob­lems with this are: 1) no one can get email from out­side the net­work. Since I’m on a dif­fer­ent net­work I’ve set up my own email on the web­serv­er. This also means that the boss main­tains anoth­er POP­mail­box out­side that he – get this – for­wards all his mail to. So he can read his email at home.

    So we’re get­ting all our spam in and hav­ing to resend it to Bri­an every day. I don’t even want to think about the band­width that eats up.

    2) we had to do some fan­cy redi­rec­tion and for­ward­ing to con­vince the mailserv­er that it should NOT store my emails. Even if I get the mails on the web­serv­er, mail from inside the office has to be sent OUT, which is not SOP.

    3) I have to send mail through Pac­Bel­l’s SMTP server.

    4) BCC does­n’t seem to work AT ALL.

    5) It’s just plain stupid.

    HUNDREDS of hours spent deal­ing with what could be a SIMPLE instal­la­tion. When I’ve even hint­ed that the job could be done bet­ter with the lin­ux box I get the same response: “well, this fil­ters all our virus­es and updates on a dai­ly basis” which IMO trans­lates to “I spent a hun­dred and fifty bucks on this ten years ago and I’m not gonna let that hun­dred and fifty bucks go to waste by using some­thing free even if it works better.”

    Any­how. It’s called MDae­mon. I’ve heard good things about it; I’m sure that it’s actu­al­ly way more pow­er­ful than we need. Hope­ful­ly I can get in here real soon and at least get the file­serv­er capa­bil­i­ty split off from the mailserv­er capa­bil­i­ty so we can give the mailserv­er a live IP address and stop the damn “store-and-for­ward” mess of multiPOP.

    Although giv­en a BSD box and an NT4 box and an office full of XP machines (and a cou­ple of Macs) I think it’s smarter to use the BSD box as the mailserv­er and the NT4 box as a file­serv­er rather than set­ting up Sam­ba on the BSD box and MDae­mon on the NT4 box. But maybe that’s just my prejudice.

  3. That’s just what my com­pa­ny
    That’s just what my com­pa­ny did: mail and http and ftp serv­er on Lin­ux, file serv­er on NT4. (And I cer­tain­ly had fun when the file serv­er ran out of space and it need­ed an add-on IDE card to han­dle mod­ern disk capac­i­ties. Espe­cial­ly when I had to spend hours reset­ting the per­mis­sions of files whose own­er­ships were nonex­is­tent users.)

  4. Well, that stuff could all
    Well, that stuff could all hap­pen on *ix machines, of course.

    Yes, giv­en my pref­er­ences it would ALL be on *ix box­en, but I’m not about to make a case for burn­ing down the exist­ing NT box to put Lin­ux or BSD on it. I don’t think I could hon­est­ly make that case.

    Plus, I don’t WANT to be an admin here. Sysad­min expe­ri­ence is not going near my resume under any cir­cum­stances, so why would I waste time gain­ing that experience?

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