Aliases again - not working

Question

I have just installed osX 10.6.7 with mail services:
Situation:
3 Domains
Each domain has the same shortname users, such as postmaster, info, abuse
Most users were already hosted by us on a windows system and don't want to change their email address to suit mac.
Problems:
Take user [email protected]
John used to have the email address [email protected]
I have entered this string into the shortname list in the workgroup manager, then to make sure stopped and restarted mailing.
John cannot send mails using the smtp service unless he set his mail address in his mail client (also mac) to [email protected]
I also added the alternate email address into his email list under users in the server preferences. Again to no avail.
No matter what I do I have found that all my users have got to use their entire shortname address and that none of the aliases work correctly sending mail. It appears in some cases that their mail is rejected by the spam filter.
Most answers to this type of question just get a rudimentary answer: RTM at page 79 or whatever, but unfortunately the docs do not really deliver correct answers because it just doesn't work. There was a post in february 2010 which stated explicitly that there is a sever error preventing you using workgroup manager to make the necessary assignments.
I am not sure if I have several myServerdomain, virtual hosts, domain1, domain2 etc whether I need to enter the base domain , myServerDomain, also in the hosting list. It didn't seem to matter but who knows.
The main problem, assuming I get the aliasing to work at all is how to differentiate between users with the same shortname alias or rather name part of their email address, but belong to different domains.
The docs on editing the postfix file show:
alias: list of addresses
john: [email protected], [email protected]
but can i enter a non unique name in the alias?
postmaster: postmaster@domain1
postmaster: postmaster@domain2
or like:
postmaster@domain1; postmaster@domain1
postmaster@domain2; postmaster@domain2
or even
joe@domain1: [email protected]
joe@domain2: [email protected]
Without a feature to distinguish between users in this way it makes running a multi-domain mail service a nightmare or maybe even impossible.
Does anybody have solutions?
Help greatly appreciated

Answer 1

Not completely sure I understand what your asking, but if you Enabled virtual hosts in server admin>Mail>Advanced>Hosting and entered domain1.com, domain2.com, etc., The only thing you have to do is enter the short name in the Workgroup Manager like johndomain1com, and enter an alias underneath [email protected], and so on for the rest.The mail server resolves the alias from there on.
We usually, to keep things organized by domain in WGM, enter the short name like domain1-com-john, and add an alias of [email protected], then domain2-com-john, and alias [email protected]