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Virtual domains

Your mail server will have one fully qualified domain name — for example, postbox.example.com. In this case, the base domain is example.com. If someone visits https://example.com/, they might be greeted by the Roundcube webmail login page.

But your server doesn’t have to handle only one domain. You can have mailboxes on multiple domains like:

  • jack@example.com
  • lucy@example.com
  • tina@example.org
  • jeff@example.net

These are three different domains, and your server can handle them all.

This is what virtual domains are for. You give your mail server a list of domains and email addresses and it will receive emails for them. Your users will also have passwords that they need to type in to retrieve their emails. You can even set up mailing lists that take messages sent to one address and forward them to several mailboxes at once.

To make all this work, we’ll store the configuration in a small MariaDB database. Postfix, Dovecot, and Roundcube will all read from this database to know which domains exist, which mailboxes they have, and where each email should go. You will create that simple database on the next page.