Topic: website is hosted, can we still use webmail?

[helping dad]

Am setting up an emith server for my folks as they are moving into an office, and outta the basement.

Will be serving win2k clients on a cable modem connection. The website is hosted but I'd like to have emsith run as the email server and provide webmail. I setup the server twice on 2 dry runs and things are copacetic, except for the email stuff. This is what I think is the solution.

-edit hosts to point to actual website
-buy www.newdomain.com espressly for webmail
-publish mx records for www.ourdoamin.com pointin to www.newdomain.com
-setup webmail at www.newdomain.com

I'd try this myself but they really cannot be without email. Can I use www.newdomain.com just to identify the server and still send & receive email as if it's coming/going form www.ourdomain.com. Could this work? If this is overly complicated or completely wrong I'm all ears. Thanks.

[Darrell May]

All you need to do is have your DNS provider set your DNS up correctly pointing the MX records to your e-smith server IP.  In the e-smith manager, under Hostnames, you point www.yourdomain.com to the correct hosted IP address and your done.  Only one domain name needed

Regards,

Darrell

[helping dad]

I made the changes in the hostname in the manger. But it didn't wok. Made an entry for "www.ourdomain.com" and listed xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx nothing. Also pointed the "www" entry in the hostnames at the same ip. Again nothing. Did a restart of the server. Still nothing. So I entered "www.yahoo.com" with the ip of the e-smith box. Lo and behold... nothing.

On a whim I logged in as root. And navigated to /etc/hosts, there was a remark in there saying to edit the files in etc/e-smith/templates. So I get there and find by cd-ing and ls-ing I find /etc/e-smith/templates/hosts/10localhost. in pico add ip address and www.ourdomain.com. Since I have no linux experience at all I was a little leery of doing this, not to mention it took me a while:>, but I restarted. Everything booted fine but www.ourdomain.com still takes me to the e-smith box. I can get to our domain by putting the ip in the browser. Am I missing something?

I did change the 10localhost file back, it's kinda cool being able to do that for me.