Group Mailing lists on Leopard Server

[ObbieZ]

Our school recently upgraded from Jaguar server, where this was so simple I didn’t even have to think about it. Now in Leopard Server, I can’t get this to work to save my life.

I want to be able to address a message to a group, e.g. [email protected]. I followed Apple’s instructions to the letter (check the box in server admin, enable the group in workgroup manager, etc), and spent the better part of two days on the Internet searching for a solution.

Relevant info:

To the outside world, server is mail.mydomain.com. This also works internally. The server also has an name on the private in-house network of server.mydomain2.com.

In SA, domain name is mydomain2.com, host name is mydomain.com (these seem to work, after trying many combinations of server names).

In WGM, the group has services enabled at mail.mydomain.com, and the ‘mailing list’ box is checked.

If I try to send a message to [email protected], I get ‘user not set up for mail’ errors. Messages to [email protected] get thru, both inhouse and outhouse.

I’ve seen posts that recommend stopping and starting the service, and I notice that in SA under Mail, Mailing lists shows as “starting up” for a long time, then shows “stopped”. Maybe I’m getting close.

Also, in Directory (leopard), clicking on the “mailing list” button addresses a message to [email protected]… not what I want.

What do I have to do to enable a group as an email address that sends mail to all users in a group. This was so seamless in 10.2, but now I’m tearing my hair out over something I thought would/should be so simple.

My users badly need to be able to send messages to groups of users.

Thanks in advance for all help and insight.
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Obbie

[ObbieZ]

All right, this morning mail sent to a group address ended up going to each user in the group, but the mail was addressed as [email protected]… not good.

I don’t know what took me there (maybe a reference in some other discussion thread), but I looked at /etc/postfix/aliases, and found the list of user email addresses for each group on the server. Every address was [email protected]. A little find/replace action in text edit changes all those addresses to [email protected].

Of course, the area that I edited was sternly labelled “DO NOT MANUALLY EDIT THIS SECTION”. If I can’t manually edit that section, than how DO I edit that section?

So sending group emails seems to be working now, but in a very unelegant and un-mac-like way… I have no guarantee at this point that things aren’t going to break again later.

If anybody can fill me in on what I SHOULD have done, it would be appreciated.

Thanks.
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Obbie

[ObbieZ]

In the /etc/postfix/alias file, the part where it says “DO NOT MANUALLY EDIT THIS SECTION” and “This section is automatically generated”….. well, some time during the night it got automatically generated back to the wrong addresses.

Where does it get the information from which to “automatically generate” the section. I’d like to fix that parameter once and for all, so that the automatically generated info stays right.

[titanium]

Do you use webmin? (www.webmin.com) I have used this successfully for adding group email addresses. Unfortunately as far as I am aware there is not an easy way to do it using Apple’s GUI or groups in WGM. Using the Mail Alias under Postfix on webmin allows you to setup an email address that can then be forwarded to as many people as you like. It is more time intensive than under 10.2 using Apple’s tools but it is the easiest way I know of.

Hope that helps

[ObbieZ]

For the benefit of the Rest of the Class, here’s what finally got this working:

In Server Admin/Mail, I went to Settings->Advanced->Hosting, and added ‘server.domain2.org’ to the list of “Local Host Aliases”.

It feels like more of a work-around than an elegant solution, but at least group-addressed emails are now going to their intended destinations.

Thanks to all who replied.
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Obbie

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