Using lists.<domain> with MailMan

[MisterIan]

Hi,

I'm having trouble with my MailMan setup with Plesk. I can't find the answer on the Web. I've opened a ticket with Parallels (hopefully they can help), but I figured I'd see if anyone in the forum can point me in the right direction.

I have a few sites/domains and email seems to work properly. I created some mailing lists and they work at list-name@<domain-name.com>, but I need them to work at list-name@lists.<domain-name.com> and I can't figure out how to get this working. I need these email addresses to work because they already existed this way on a previous server.

The lists.<domain-name.com> URL works for getting the the Web interface for MailMan.

In the Plesk Web interface I don't see a way to create mailing lists or aliases using the lists subdomain. If I attempt to create a new subdomain for "lists" it won't create because it said "lists" is already in use by mailing lists.

At first when I emailed the @lists.domain.com addresses I got a Relay access denied error.

On the command line I was able to edit the values in the virtual.db, virtual_domains.db and transport.db postfix setup to change things to use the lists.<domain> instead of the <domain>.

I also ran then sudo ./withlist -l -r fix_url <list-name> -u lists.<domain-name> command on the lists.

After all that I reload postfix and restarted postfix and mailman.

The good news? If I email list-name@lists.<domain> the message seems to go to the right place (at least for me). The problem though is when I receive the message I sent it says I sent it to list-name@<domain> so when I click reply it says list-name@<domain> instead of list-name@lists.<domain>, so something still isn't configured correctly.

My first priority is getting that working.

But, am I even on the right track? Is there a better way to do it? Other negatives with this approach include that the Plesk interface says list-name@<domain> for the lists and I'm concerned about the maintenance as users want to create new lists. With this approach I would need to manually edit the files, run withlist, etc on every list creation (and also hope that none of my changes get overwritten. Seems awfully complex for just wanting to have lists@lists.<domain>!

Any advice?

P.S. If I figure it out or get a helpful answer from Parallels I'll definitely update everyone.

 

[abdi]

MisterIan, did you get any helpful answer from Parallels?

 

[MisterIan]

Hello abdi,

I have a solution, though it's not great.

In each customer account I get it setup to have lists.<domain> as a separate domain associated with the account.

This does the trick and solves the problem, but here are some considerations:
* It makes lists.<domain> function properly in both the email addresses and URL, but it also makes a URL for lists.lists.<domain> which is a bit awkward. Links to that could confuse people, though it's not particularly problematic.
* If you use the DNS on the server and you let the DNS CNAME for lists.<domain> exist / get re-created within the <domain> domain it will disable DNS for that customer because you can't have lists.<domain> as a CNAME and an A record. My hack of a workaround is to run a cron job regularly to check if the lists CNAMES re-appeared, to remove them, to to re-activate customer accounts, and restart DNS.

There may have been other issues, but those are the main ones that come to mind. It's not pretty, but it works. IMHO it seems like a hassle to get something as simple as lists.<domain> working, but I guess it's one of the prices we pay for the ease of maintenance with Plesk.

Hope that helps!

 

[abdi]

Thanks for sharing that information MisterIan. Am sure it will help some one out there.

 

[apardo]

Is there an official answer regarding this issue?

We're seeing the same behavior in our panels (in production and also in staging). What's with this issue? Why is happening? Is there a workaround? The solution proposed by MasterIan doesn't suit us. We want it to work as it should.