microUgly.com

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- flexible girl - by SaschaHuettenhain
12 Nov, 2005

E-mail Accounts & E-mail Addresses

I've just had a lengthy process getting an e-mail address working with my domain. My host uses a package called cPanel which pretty much gives you a web interface to everything you would need to be able to do with your host. But unfortunately, it doesn't always produce the most ideal solutions

I first noticed this when creating my MySQL database. When I created the database with my own name, it appended my user name to beginning of it. There is no way to get around this. All your databases must begin with your user name.

But the e-mail problem was a little more bothersome. In the e-mail account manager I have a main account with my username as the login. Whilst not indicated, the e-mail address was assumed to be username@microugly.com. I also created a second account for my add-on domain, bob@domain2.com.

When testing, bob@domain2.com was working fine, but username@microugly.com did not. It was checking mail without an error, it just wasn't recieving the messages I sent.

After contacting support and doing some tests I came to the conclusion that username@microugly.com is an e-mail account but it is not an email address. I could check the account but there was no such address as username@microugly.com for mail to be sent to.

My hosts Support seemed to be unclear on this difference as their solution was to set Catch All to direct mail to the username mail account. I got the impression this was their typical setup for all users. And whilst that did mean that anything sent to username@microugly.com ended up in the username mail account, it als meant that any imagined e-mail address ending with @microugly.com would also be put in the username mail account. If I wanted to use Catch All to bounce an invalid e-mail address, username@microugly.com would bounce also.

My work around was to create username@microugly.com like I did with bob@domain2.com. I now have two username@microugly.com accounts with different logons and different storage locations — the original that could not actually recieve mail and the new one that can recieve mail. And that leave Catch All free to use to bounce messages back from invalid e-mail addresses.

The Horde web mail program illustrated the difference between the mail accounts by listing the accounts in a tree, like so:

I've conceded that this is simply by design and provided I'm using a mail client like Thunderbird and I only use the new username@microugly.com e-mail address, it won't make any difference to my day to day use. But I still feel it's a glaring oversight and am suprised that so many people accept the method of using Catch All to direct all mail, sent to invalid addresses, into the main mail account.

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