Apache2: Deny access for mail.mydomain.com but allow www.mydomain.com, both points same ip

Question

i have a linux mail+http server located throguh Internet at www.mydomain.com. Domain was bought at GoDaddy so after configuring the server and getting the public ip address i went at GoDaddy's profile to modify the A and MXentries for my dns zone in order to point them to my server's public ip address. In the MX entry i did not placed the ip address but an alias called mail.mydomain.com.

Everything works fine but, as www.mydomain.com and mail.mydomain.com both are pointing to x.y.w.z where i have apache running, when you write www.mydomain.com or either mail.mydomain.com in the Internet Browser my default web page is shown. I would like to tell apache to only show the page if www.mydomain.com is written in the url and deny the access if mail.mydomain.com is written. Does anyone knows how sould i do it? Thanks :)

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin admin@mydomain.com
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mydomain.com/
  ServerName www.mydomain.com
  ErrorLog logs/mydomain_com-error_log
  CustomLog logs/mydomain_com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Answer 1

Just create another virtual host for mail.example.com, and you can tell Apache to do whatever you want when people go to that host.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    ServerName mail.example.com
    ErrorLog logs/example_com-error_log
    # if you care about hits:
    CustomLog logs/example_com-access_log common

Then, if you want to forbid access entirely:

    <Directory />
        Order allow,deny
        Deny from all
    </Directory>

Or to redirect to your real domain do this instead:

    RedirectPermanent / http://www.example.com/

Or you could do something else.

</VirtualHost>

Answer 2

If you put the following into your .htaccess every visitor coming to your site by means of any domain other than www.example.com will be forcedly redirected to the right domain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)          http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]