Re: Table driven delivery

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 04:09:36PM +0300, Patrick J. Okui wrote:
> 	I was just looking up the "table driven delivery" system that we
> set up during the afnog sessions and my question is....
> How do I set my POP3 agent to authenticate against those created tables
> (assuming that I am using qpopper or qmail)?

Ah. Well we missed out the exercises where we were going to install
courier-imap and use that to read mail:
http://www.ws.afnog.org/afnog2001/services/mail/courier.html

See section 2b, where we would have created a second database, /etc/userdb
(which is compiled to /etc/userdb.dat and /etc/userdbshadow.dat)

Now, as for qmail's pop3d: there are a whole bunch of alternative
authentication modules (replacing 'checkpasswordd') which can be used to
login and give the Maildir location for a particular account.
http://www.qmail.org/top.html#checkpassword

You can even get qmail-pop3d to authenticate against Courier's
authentication modules, including authuserdb:
http://homepages.strath.ac.uk/~ras97108/authpop/index.html
(although by the time you had installed Courier's authentication modules,
you might as well just use Courier's pop3 daemon anyway)

However, I didn't come across a _clean_ system which lets you drive both the
MTA and the POP3 daemon from the same database. There were a couple of
candidates that I investigated (vmailmgr, vpopmail) but both were heavily
dependent on using qmail for mail delivery, rather than generating a table
which exim could use.

So where I was going to leave it was that you'd have one set of tables for
Exim delivery:
     Local domains
     E-mail address  ===>  Maildir location
     Maildir         ===>  quota

And a second table for POP3/IMAP etc:
     Username        ===>  crypt password/Maildir location/quota

and use scripts to keep them in sync. With a bit of work I think it should
be possible to add extra fields to the userdb, and extract them out into the
exim tables. I didn't have time to do that.

The other approach is to have an LDAP or mysql database, which can be
queried by both, but that adds another layer of complexity.

Regards,

Brian.

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