Topic: number of characters in e-mail address

[Chris]

Hi There,

What template do I need to modify in Version 4 to allow me to have the users e-mail as username.lastname@mycompany.xxx as it is limited an will not allow me to creare these user names.  We only use e-smith for e-mail and not file sharing.


Thanks

[jay]

You can find an .rpm and source .rpm that will allow you to do special aliasing with firstname.lastname@yourcompany.xxx at the following site:

http://e-smith.gormand.com.au/4.0-preview/

Its called  e-smith-fullname-alias.(version#).rpm and includes a source .rpm in case you wish to modify it to do 'username'.lastname instead of 'firstname'.lastname, or whatever.

Eventually these .rpms will be available on the e-smith site, hopefully early this week.  But for now you'll find what you are looking for there.

Hope this helps.

Jay

[jay]

Actually, my fault, the .rpm files are located on site already, the ones you seek are located at:

ftp://ftp.e-smith.net/pub/e-smith/contrib/charlieb/


Also, a correction, I never meant to say ".rpms" - was thinking plural but not realizing what I was typing.

[Chris]

Hi Jay,

Thank you. I will install the file.

Thanks

[Chris]

Hi Jay,

I have installed the alias .rpm but still can not create user names longer than 12 characters. Perhaps I am missing something somewhere?

Thanks

[jay]

Hmm.  I've tried doing what I'm going to say next once before (if you do a search on '12 characters' in the general forum you'll see a previous discussion) and it never worked in the end from what I understood but we'll try again.

The 12 character limitation was more of an ibay-shared files changes.  We noticed on MS Win95/98 machines that ibays longer than 13 characters would not be viewable by network neighbourhood browsers because they truncated to a max. of 13 characters.  This was at the time of release and we just decided to limit to 12 characters the length of the users/ibays/group names in order to avoid those problems.

Technically, you're not supposed to edit the code, but that is where you'll find the single statement limiting to 12 characters.

1. Login into your e-smith S&G as root.
2. Edit the file 'useraccounts' in the directory /etc/e-smith/web/functions.  (use whatever editor, vi probably best).
3. Do a search for the number 12.  It'll give you a piece of perl code that says something like

if (length($acctName) > 12)
{
   /* BLAH */
}

Change the 12 to whatever you want it to say.  Or, and this is in retrospect (I haven't tried it) remove the check alltogether.    Might want to also change the error message to no longer say 12 either.

Please realize this is untested.  I've done it once, changed it to 16 char. or 20 char. and it worked fine.   But as you'll see from the previous post, he had lots of troubles.

I hope this works for you.  Good luck.

[Gordon Rowell]

Chris wrote:

> Hi Jay,
>
> I have installed the alias .rpm but still can not create user
> names longer than 12 characters. Perhaps I am missing something
> somewhere?

No, you will not be able to create _usernames_ longer than 12
characters, but you will be able to create aliases. The add-on RPM
will automatically generate aliases of the form Firstname.Lastname
when you create users. Just type their fullname in the normal
fields and the aliases will be created.

Under the covers, it creates the files

/var/qmail/alias/.qmail-firstname:lastname

So, for Gordon Rowell, it will create

/var/qmail/alias/.qmail-gordon:rowell

Have a look in those files to determine whether it is working
properly. And then send mail to the fullname alias.

I strongly recommend you stay with the 12 character maximum until
we can determine whether a longer limit will work in all circumstances.

Gordon

[Charlie Brady]

Chris wrote:

> I have installed the alias .rpm but still can not create user
> names longer than 12 characters. Perhaps I am missing something
> somewhere?

As Gordon has explained, you should stick to usernames of 12 characters, but you can use email addresses of firstname.lastname@your.domain.

However, when you add the e-smith-fullname-alias RPM, the email aliases won't be automatically setup for any existing users, they will only be created for any new users that you create.

As a workaround for this, you should go into the Modify User option of the manager for each of your existing users, then hit the Modify button without changing any of the form values. This will create the alias file for that user.

Please note also that the e-smith-fullname-alias RPM needs a minor change to be fully compatible with e-smith 4.0. It currently has a bug - the fullname aliases are not removed if you delete a user. This shouldn't cause you any problems, but look out for an update which should be available this week some time.

Regards

Charlie

[Chris]

Thank you for all your support, I have it working now.


Regards



Chris