Mail-only Accounts -- One Easy, One Tricky

[orty]

Hello there,

I have a client that has two domains he wants me to host the email for, and one will be easy, and the other is going to be a tad more complicated for.

1) domain1.com currently is just a mail-only account with another company, with HTTP requests to the domain just redirecting to domain2. However, I probably will need to host pages at domain1.com in sub-directories at some point, so my thought was just to transfer the domain over to my server, set him up with the xmail theme, and then redirect web-root index.html-type of requests to domain2.com. So that'll be nice and easy.

2) domain2.com is a bit more complicated. Unlike the above domain, I can't take over management of the domain and DNS, as it's being hosted by one of those hosted applicated places that has to have DNS control over the domain. However, they don't provide email services (email services are, apparently, provided by Data393, which I dealt with MANY years ago during the whole VenturesOnline/Data393 mess -- I don't have their account information anywhere, however). I can have the hosted provider change the MX records for the domain to my server, which won't be that big of a deal. However, I do want to make sure requests FROM my server to domain2.com are actually routed to the web server, as I have some cron jobs on my server that request information from their Web server for another project. How can I make sure this gets setup properly, and can I just setup the account as "mail.domain2.com" and have them do the DNS to have the MX records in mail.domain2.com?

I'm a DNS moron, so, basically, how would you guys handle domain2.com?

Thanks!

[Bash]

Just setup the account like you normally would. The authoratative DNS holder will then point their MX record to your server. Then you need to ENSURE that both DNS records, theirs and yours are exactly the same. Create your email accounts and restart bind (DNS) on your mail server. Wait for DNS to propagate the changes and give things a try.

-Bash

[orty]

Would I also need to make sure that domain2.com is NOT in /etc/localdomains? The cron job I have on this same server looks for domain2.com (it's pulling data from it), so if it's in localdomains, it would look locally, which I DON'T want it to do. Or would it look locally for the DNS information, and then see it has to go elsewhere?