Feature request: Domain-specific email storage and logins

Web hosting discussion, programming, and shared and dedicated servers.
8 posts Page 1 of 1
by markmid » Thu Apr 04, 2013 2:55 am
There should be a way to set up email storage and logins that are tied directly to the domain, rather than indirectly through a sonic.net account.

Details:

We host a domain on sonic.net, which I manage. Let's call it someco.biz.

For many email accounts in the domain, I simply forward the user's someco.biz to another email account that they have. No problems there.

Some other users, however, prefer to have their email client software get email from the someco.biz/sonic server. For these users, I created a separate, "native" sonic.net address and forward the mails to that. E.g.:

hiram@someco.biz forwards to sc_hiram@sonic.net

I did it that way because sonic doesn't provide a more direct method to store email for domain addresses, and
someone at sonic.net suggested this indirect approach.

This indirect approach works, but it's not at all intuitive for users who want to access email via sonic webmail or who want to configure their autoresponse messages. They have to (1) remember to go to sonic.net to login, and (2) remember a login name that's different from their someco.biz user name (e.g., ww_hiram instead of hiram). Users often forget or get confused and have to ask me for the procedure and for their login credentials.

The indirection also makes initial configuration of the user's email client unnecessarily confusing/unintuitive.

There should be a way to configure the domain so that users can login directly to someco.biz for webmail and email account configuration (especially autoresponse message) and use someco.biz server and user names for email client configuration. Most other web hosts that I've used has this capability.

Thanks,
Mark
by bgupta » Tue Feb 18, 2014 1:01 pm
Wow, that's exactly the same issue that I have encountered.

From the sonic.net page: http://www.sonic.net/sales/hosting/ it is not obvious to me that you can't create arbitrary email addresses (and mailboxes and user mail credentials) in your custom domain.

From here:
http://www.sonic.net/sales/hosting/value-hosting.shtml

If you read the following features:

50 email-only accounts
IMAP mail service (More Info)

It is not clear again that these are just aliases not full fledged mailboxes with login rights (on that listed IMAP server).

Someone should clarify the "features" better.

-Bhusan
by cdkeen » Thu Feb 20, 2014 1:30 pm
To clarify, you can create as many aliases as you like for a given domain however you cannot use the user@yourdomain email address as a username to login to Sonic.net webmail or when configuring a computer email client. The 50 email only accounts referenced mean 50 actual email users@sonic.net (in which [users] is the login username and this user has a unique [password] for login, they get their own mail spool) that can authenticate to Sonic's mail servers for incoming/outgoing mail. You can configure Sonic's webmail with an identity so as to send from user@yourdomain instead of user@sonic.net (and almost all PC based email clients support this feature as well).
cdkeen - Sonic.net System Operations
by markmid » Sat Mar 29, 2014 9:43 pm
True, but the native [user@]sonic.net address is not what most users want. It's an extra level of indirection that simply complicates things and confuses people. Sonic.net should provide a direct yourdomain.com webmail login (and yourdomain.com email client configuration for those who prefer to do things that way).

I've been a sonic.net customer for well over a decade, recommended it to many people, and in general really like the company, its services, and the support. But this particular shortcoming is an awkward kludge that really should be addressed.

Thanks.
by guest » Wed Mar 04, 2015 1:47 am
Is this still the way email works with hosted domains or has something changed?
by QuickQuery » Wed Mar 16, 2016 12:48 pm
A year later. What can you say about this? Has it been fixed so us long-time sonic customers can host our own unique domain email addresses?
by kgc » Wed Mar 16, 2016 12:59 pm
No, and this is not likely to change any time soon. It is a fair criticism but a non-trivial paradigm change. We can, however, make it more transparent in the tools so the number of steps are reduced and new mailboxes and aliases can be added in a single place.
Kelsey Cummings
System Architect, Sonic.net, Inc.
by osmack » Mon Dec 10, 2018 3:27 pm
Come on SONIC, why on earth is this not a feature of your hosting? Even Earthlink gets this concept...
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