What is better to use as usernames format?

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#1 Mon, 12/01/2014 - 09:05
ADDISON74

What is better to use as usernames format?

Go to System Settings -> Server Templates -> Default Settings. From the drop-down section choose [Mail for domain]. The last option is "Format for usernames that includes domain".

My email addresses are in this format firstname.lastname@domain.com. I could choose format as username@domain but from description this format creates trouble in Postfix. As I understand in order to fix this another user is created for Postfix to run without these issues.

1) What is your suggestion related to this? If I will setup accounts based on @ it is much easier to login into accounts. But if I use user.domain format, how a user will deal with authentifications? For example in FTP what will be the username? firstname.lastname.domain.com? Inside email client what is the username? The same as firstname.lastname.domain.com?

2) In case my email users are confused I am thinking creating aliases for example: firstname.lastname.domain.com -> firstname.lastname@domain.com. Then these users can use easy as username the email address. Could work this approach?

Thank you.

Mon, 12/01/2014 - 11:10
ReArmedHalo

Hi,

I use user@domain. You are correct in that the username in email clients would be "first.last.domain.com". Sorry I cannot provide you with more information, not very knowlesdgable on the specifics on usernames with postfix. I've never ran into an issue using the username@donain format howveer.

-Dustin

Mon, 12/01/2014 - 11:11
andreychek

Howdy,

That all comes down to personal preference. Virtualmin uses some workarounds to handle the Postfix issues with the '@' in the username.

If you are okay with those workarounds (which are, essentially, just creating a second user for each account on your system) -- it actually works quite fine to use user@domain as a username.

When using the 'user.domain' format, it is something like "eric.virtualmin" by default (no .tld unless there is a clash, by default).

If you're using first.last, it would be eric.andreychek.virtualmin. Or you could configure it to always add the .com if you wanted.

However, I use user@domain on my own systems. I get the impression Joe doesn't care for using that format, and doesn't use that due to the workarounds involved. But I think Joe likes to make things hard ;-)

If you can ignore the extra user that's created, I haven't seen any problems in using the user@domain format, and it seems to make a lot more sense to users.

-Eric

Mon, 12/01/2014 - 15:13
ADDISON74

I would like to ask you, if I create a Virtual Server with a format e.g. username.domain can I change it to username@domain after a while? If Yes, please let me know how can it be achieved.

Thank you.

Mon, 12/01/2014 - 16:01
andreychek

Howdy,

You can't change the username format once it's been created, unfortunately. You would need to delete the user, change the username format in the Server Template, and then re-create the user.

-Eric

Tue, 09/29/2015 - 07:16
ADDISON74

A friend of mine would like to switch from user.domain to user@domain. I recommended to delete all users except administrator, change format then recreating one by one all users. Is it the correct way? Could create some trouble inside configuration? We except the fact all users will have to change their connect information inside their email clients.

I will do also a test inside a VM to see what is happening.

Tue, 09/29/2015 - 10:00
andreychek

Howdy,

Yup! What you described would work.

-Eric

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