Now that I understand the argument, here's my us$0.04 worth
...
Resellers should not have to have a domain on the box. Nor should dns be completely automatic. There should be an option for DNS but it shouldn't be automatic.
And yes, we need an off-domain email address for each of our clients. In addition, we strongly suggest our clients have an off-domain support email address so they'll still get their support emails even if everything goes down. We have servers on multiple networks, so we're happy to set up (at a charge of course; here's a way for you to make a few extra bucks/yen/marks/pounds
) a domain and a support email address, for example
[email protected], so the client can log into our server, say every five minutes, to get support email. And if his box or our entire data center goes down he can still get his mail.
We had a similar problem today with one of our resellers who has an entire Plesk box. He set up a domain for a new customer so his new client could see the domain before it went live.
Then he sent the customer an email. The email never got to the customer because the (Plesk default) qmail installation "knew" the domain was local, only tried local delivery, and since there were no email accounts, returned the email as undeliverable.
Jeff