Domain aliases to have their own unique email

[iantresman]

I need aliased domains to have their own unique email facilities. I have:

www.customer.com
www.different.com (aliased to customer.com, but a different customer!)

Each domain belongs to a different customer, so each must have their own mailbox and forward rules.

The domains are aliased because they share the same Drupal codebase, and Drupal is smart enough to allow each site to be customized separately.

This works exactly as expected on my old non-Plesk server.

 

[Faris Raouf]

This isn't what the Domain Alias feature is designed to do so it isn't possible to do what you want using this particular feature.

How to get what you want kind of depends on how Drupal is detecting which domain users are visiting.

For example you could set up a separate subscription for the second domain, and set the hosting for it to non-frame forward to the first domain. If Drupal picks up on the forwarding, all is well and you can do what you want.

If it doesn't, you could try setting up a separate subscription again for the second domain, but don't set up hosting at all. Then add the necessary apache virtualdomain directives for the second domain via the vhost.conf on the first domain. Not sure if this will work or not, but it might. You will probably have to manually add the necessessary www. dns record in for the second domain though.

 

[iantresman]

I can of see where you're coming from. I only suggested the alias feature having the required features, because that is how my old non-Plesk server worked. The frames solution is a non-starter. I don't think Drupal would work this way, and I think it is a bit of kludge.

The Apache virtual domain directives sounds like the correct approach, though using vhosts.conf looks a bit scary. It would be very nice if Plesk had this as a forth hosting option (mirror? shadow? virtual alias?), which automatically created the appropriate vhost file that pointed to another existing domain.

I guess this would work in only the same subscription, though it would be nice if admins and resellers could have it work across subscriptions (I could have a master Drupal installation), and then virtually point other domains in other subscriptions to it!

But a forth hosting "virtual alias" for customers in the same subscription would be great!

 

[iantresman]

I think I have this solved.

It seems that when you "Add New Domain", your can set its document root to an existing website. The new domain gets its own email facilities, and it is then aliased to the existing website. Simply!

I was worried that it might copy the installation files to the directory (it doesn't), or that it might give an error saying that the directory exists, or on deleting the second domain, it might delete the directory which is shared by the first (it didn't).

I guess it would be useful if there was an option to select an existing directory in order to alias the domain to an existing website.

 

[Faris Raouf]

Ooh! Interesting. I didn't know you could do that either. Good find.