Network Services - Mail

Introduction / Philosophy

This page gives an overview of mail processing at ESO, and deals with several problems and procedures.

Incoming Mail

Incoming mail for anything ending eso.org goes to web3.hq.eso.org, which is the externally visible mailserver for the eso.org domain.

From web3, mail is forwarded to one of the /var/mail servers according to the file poisson:/var/aliases/forward.list.

In non-VLT ESO, the /var/mail servers are NFS mounted by most other machines within the same domain, to allow users to read their mail elsewhere.

In VLT the incoming mail directory is not exported and so mail is only readable on te1.

Outgoing Mail

Outgoing mail in non-VLT ESO is sent from a host to it's designated mail hub (look for 'DH' in /etc/sendmail.cf).

And from there it is sent out directly to the internet.

Mail Clients

The mail user agents in user in ESO are: mh, exmh, elm, pine, netscape, mailtool, emacs-rmail, PC-based POP3 clients such as Eudora there are even some people using Unix mail and mailx.

Problems and Procedures

  • Procecure: Permanently redirecting user mail to another ESO division
  • Procedure: Permanently redirecting user mail to non-ESO addresses
  • Procedure: Temporarily redirecting user mail
  • Procedure: Mailing lists and miscellaneous redirections
  • Problem: User not receiving mail
  • Problem: Corrupted mailbox
  • Problem: Pop server not responding
  • Problem: Netcape - cannot process 'From' lines
  • Problem: 'User unknown' error for ESO users
  • Problem: poisson:make in /var/aliases Fails
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