Hosting on Plesk, mail service elsewhere?

[Omniflux]

Does anyone know how to setup a domain so mail can be handled by another server?

I can setup DNS to do this, but if I try to send mail to the domain through the plesk server (i.e. from a user in another domain), the plesk server tries to handle it locally instead to sending it to the appropriate mail server.

Even though I disabled the mail service under the domain settings, It seems qmail still thinks it handles mail for the domain.

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Omniflux

 

[jtroher]

If you have mail services for the domain disabled, make sure you did not set the new option regarding how to handle non-existant recipient to REJECT.

I found that setting that option to reject will cause qmail to reject the mail if the domain is on the PSA server and mail is MX'ed somewhere else.

Set that option to bounce non-existant users and mail should work normally again.

John

 

[Omniflux]

That solved it. Thanks!

 

[Spyder]

Originally posted by Omniflux
That solved it. Thanks!

Perfect, but now you can share with US ...

I have this prob too..

TIA.

 

[Omniflux]

What information do you need besides not setting the REJECT option?

 

[jtroher]

I just disable the mail service for the domain and set the unknown recipient action to bounce, make sure that if your PSA server is using the internal DNS server for lookups that the DNS refeclts the proper MX records.

In my case my PSA servers use external DNS servers for lookups, my external DNS servers also act as slaves for the PSA domains and pull zone transfers from the PSA server

 

[alexp]

Can you guys tell me since you have setup the plesk to use the external mail server, what hapens with the plesk mail administration such as changing passwords, using mailman, setting mailbox quotas etc. Does all that work as well?

Alex

 

[jtroher]

No, the control panel cannot control mail services that are hosted on another server.

A example of why we would turn off mail and point the MX to another server is because the customer is running their own mail server like exchange. They would manage that themselves.

 

[alexp]

Hmm ok thanks. But then the whole plesk features around client mail administration wont work. Very dissapointing (. I was very impressed with plesk but this way like 50% of the features are gone fro the client point of view.


alex

 

[Whistler]

Originally posted by alexp
Hmm ok thanks. But then the whole plesk features around client mail administration wont work. Very dissapointing (. I was very impressed with plesk but this way like 50% of the features are gone fro the client point of view.

Why? How do you expect Plesk to administrate software which it has no control over on a remote server?

The basic feature of Plesk is to integrate the creation, edition and deletion of a bunch of textfiles (settings and configuration) that control the different parts of a hosting-system into a nice looking and intuitive/easy-to-use webinterface. (Read: Plesk generaly does very little magic that can't be done by an administrator in a simple shell)

So if you want to provide the mail-solution from Plesk to your customers - why not just install Plesk on your (remote) mailserver? Then they'll be able to manage all the mail settings you want

 

[alexp]

Hi,

I am not saying that plesk should manage other servers. I am saying how can plesk assume that someone should have both web and mail server on same machine. I have 10,000 email account on the mail server and I have 1500 domains and 1200 web sites. Now based on plesk policy I should have one very very strong machine to handle all of them or I should have multiple web/mail servers with plesk licenses on all of them and I would have to spread email accounts to different servers. ( I put the above numbers fo example).
Also I did not mean that plesk should manage the remote mail server, but at the same time I dont think that plesk fully manages qmail also. Plesk has integrated into plesk an interface/api between plesk and qmail for setting up accounts, puting mailbox limits, etc etc.
Why they did not made the same interface/api for sendmail, postfix and couple of other popular mail servers. This is very simple thing to do provisioning few services on a remote server. I am not into a business of selling control panels but if I am for sure I would thing a little bit further more than what my opion is in this case plesk opion.