Hi there,

I'm running a web and mail server on a Slackware box at home, for educational purposes. Recently my friend asked me to put a wiki on there for him, using MediaWiki. When it's finished, the wiki will be public, but the rest of the site I would like to keep private. Apart from anything else, if the wiki takes off, it will have to be transferred to a higher powered server, in which case he'll want to maintain control of the wiki address and I'll want to keep control of my personal web address.

To facilitate this, my private stuff is run on the server's main address/hostname, and the wiki is accessed via a virtual host on a different address (under Apache 1.3.x). Prior to the wiki being installed, the qmail setup was used purely for my personal email. Now, however, we would like to use it for MediaWiki's automated email notifications. Leaving aside problems about such messages being filtered as spam, does anyone know how to configure the wiki messages to originate from the virtual server address, rather than the system hostname? At the moment, the messages have the "From:" address as specified in the wiki setup, but checking the headers of the messages it sends shows that the "Return-path:" is anonymous@hostname.com. I'd like it to be something like wiki-auto@wikiaddress.com.

Presumably this requires the configuration of another virtual mail domain in qmail, which I haven't done but shouldn't (hopefully) be too hard. Would that be enough? I'm guessing not, but what else needs to be done? I expect that something else needs to be changed in the MediaWiki install, but what? I don't know where to look, and haven't been able to find anything in the setup instructions on the MediaWiki homepage, or in "Similar Threads" on this site.

Thanks for any help you can give.

I believe this is defined during the setup of media wiki. And I do believe you'll need to set up the domain in QMail on this machine that you want the messages sent from, otherwise QMail will think it's not a local domain and not accept messages for that domain name (unless you do something like add it to rcpthosts).
Looking in my LocalSettings.php file that was generated during install, it defined what email would send the lost password messages (which I assume would be additional types of messages as well).
Hope that helps some.

Thanks for your response. The only variables corresponding to email I could find in LocalSettings.php were $wgEmergencyContact and $wgPasswordSender, both of which are configured to the outbound address that appears in the "From:" header of the mail. The "Return-path:" section of the header is still incorrect though.

Having done a quick test on wikipedia, which also uses MediaWiki, both the "From:" address and the "Return-path:" address are wiki@wikipedia.org, while the mailserver is mail.wikipedia.org. It seems they must have configured something I missed, or customised their version to get this working.

I'd appreciate any further suggestions!