Massive mail and web hosting in Debian

I migrated some web and mail services from a custom Linux distro with Apache2 and Cyrus-imapd to Apache2.2 and Dovecot (imapd + pop3d). Because there are lots of Domains, Subdomains and mail aliases, I wanted to unify as much of the configuration as possible to make maintaining the services easier.

Massive name-based virtual hosting with Apache2

The document "Dynamically configured mass virtual hosting" in the Apache HTTP Server documentation describes how to set up dynamic virtual hosting. I needed name-based virtual hosting, so I created a file "/etc/apache2/conf.d/vhosting" with the following contents:

UseCanonicalName Off
VirtualDocumentRoot /srv/www/%-2.0+.%-1/%-3+/

AllowOverride all
Options +Indexes

This will automatically map subdomain.example.com to /srv/www/example.com/subdomain/. You can then even think of more sophisticated usage, such as placing a .htaccess file with a Redirect directive in /srv/www/redirected-domain.tld/.

Migrating Cyrus mails to Dovecot Maildirs

Fazal Majid has written a Python script that can be found in this blog post. You might have to modify a bit, but apart from that, it serves the purpose well. After you have converted the (nonstandard) Cyrus mail dir to the standard Maildir(++) format, the Maildirs can be used with the Dovecot mail server. Of course, you should configure exim4 to deliver new mail into "Maildir" in the users' home directories.

Massive E-Mail virtual hosting with Exim4

Another problem that arose was multiple domains and different users for E-Mail. Thankfully, Aron Håkanson has had the same problem and written the article Virtual domains with Exim 4, in which he describes how to set up massive E-Mail virtual hosting on Debian with Exim4. This makes maintaining a plaintext list of mail alias mappings for virtual servers and a list of domains for which to handle mails very easy and keeps the list maintainer happy.

Stupid Notification E-Mails

Web-based services are great for various things. For example, I'm a user of the Game Trading Zone for trading old games, a user of YouTube for publishing short video clips and just today I've signed up on StudiVZ, a social networking site for students.

Of course, I'm not going to sign in to every service every day just to check if there are new messages or something that needs my attention. That's what e-mail notifications are here for. The best and most useful e-mail notifications I get are the ones from the Game Trading Zone: Another user sends you an offer and in the e-mail you get a complete description of the offer (what's offered + details of items, custom message, shipping and other settings) and a link to go directly to the offer site. A dream! As soon as I open the e-mail, I know all about the offer and can decide what to do.

Not so with the two bad examples which upset me so much today that I started writing what you read here. I've often got notifications from YouTube, which sends out a notification e-mail whenever someone posts a comment to a video I've uploaded. BUT the actual comment isn't in the e-mail, for that I have to open the YouTube website. How stupid is that? If they just sent the comment in the mail, I could quickly read it and decide if I have to reply, delete the (spam) comment or just read it and forget about it. Instead I have to open that YouTube page. The same stupid thing is present in StudiVZ, so they also just tell you that there is something new, but don't tell you what it is.

So, instead of a simple "read - react" cycle, I have to do a "click link - wait for browser to open - wait for page to load - search for the information in question - read - react", which is so time consuming and stupid that I really had to write this post (which, of course, takes probably as much time writing as reading one month's worth of stupid notification mails, but anyway..).

If you provide some web service that does e-mail notifications, please include useful, readable and compact information about the change/comment/whatever that you want to get through to your user. Just sending links as in "something's new, click the link to find out what it is" is just plain stupid :(