Topic: Using SME when your website is ISP hosted

[Ed Form]

Howto gain access to your ISP hosted domains from behind an SME server using virtual-domain aliases

For those who cannot obtain connections of sufficient bandwidth to host their own website or mail server, and are forced to use an outside ISP for these services, SME should still be an attractive way to supply file, print, centralised-email, and fire-walled web-browsing services to small networks. In this role, however, the software has a drawback which can make it unacceptable to many users - in order to use company email addresses for network users, the SME server must have the company domain name. This means that an ISP-hosted company website cannot be seen by machines connected to the in-house server. All requests for the company domain result in connections to the corresponding service of the SME server.

I've worked out a method to solve this problem in which you configure your in-house server with a different domain name to that used by the company and fool the mail system into treating internal and external email, addressed to the company domain, as though it was addressed to the new in-house server domain.

Since I've needed something to do this for the longest time, I figured others might find it useful, so I've made it available on my webpage at...

http://www.gopaperless.co.uk

...until the Mitel folks get round to adding it to the contributed Howto lists.

Ed Form

[Brian Read]

In my experience This is only a problem if the ISP sets up the mail box name in such a way as to include your domain name, e.g. mail.foo.co.uk.  In this case use the "hostnames and addresses" panel to set the IP address and tag as "external", then the SMEServer can access the mail box as normal.  This also applies to the web site www.foo.co.uk.   However some ISPs (Fasthosts are one), use some sort of clever subdomain naming, which means that there is no unique IP address for the mail box and/or the web site.  In this case we have solved this by forwarding the mail at the ISP to another domain, and then downloading it from there.  Ed's solution might solve it for the web site, but I have not had time to untangle that part of it.

Cheers

Brian

[Ed Form]

Brian  Read wrote:
>
> In my experience This is only a problem if the ISP sets up
> the mail box name in such a way as to include your domain
> name, e.g. mail.foo.co.uk.  In this case use the "hostnames
> and addresses" panel to set the IP address and tag as
> "external", then the SMEServer can access the mail box as
> normal.  This also applies to the web site www.foo.co.uk.  
> However some ISPs (Fasthosts are one), use some sort of
> clever subdomain naming, which means that there is no unique
> IP address for the mail box and/or the web site.  In this
> case we have solved this by forwarding the mail at the ISP to
> another domain, and then downloading it from there.  Ed's
> solution might solve it for the web site, but I have not had
> time to untangle that part of it.

I use fasthosts.

The problem with the forwarding approach is that the messages come in with the reply-to header unavailable so users can't just click reply, they have to type in the sender's email address.

There also seems to be no way to get at the Fasthosts control panel or the one that Force9 provides either and try as I may I can't get FTP to work so that clients can update their own sites.

Ed Form