An email-based program. Should one create an account?

[Panu Hällfors <panupa@iki.fi>]

Hi!

I'm a developer of a program that receives email messages
and processes them in a way. So far I have discovered
two ways to handle the situation:

a) Insert a line in /etc/aliases:
myprogram: "|/usr/bin/myprogram"
When doing it this way it doesn't need an account and its
archive and database files can be kept in /var/spool (maybe /var/lib, too).

b) Create an account for the program and use ~/.forward to pipe
the message to the program program. In this model the archive
and database files would be probably stored in ~/spool/ and alike.


The question just is, which should I use as default?
Do all the MTA:s support aliases-pipe? What about .forward-pipe?
Is there a third way to do this?

I'm a Debian user and I appreciate the Debian policy so I
believe that the best option for Debian in this issue is the best
option for my program in general. (and packaging will be easier then)

Thanks.

    Panu

-- 
   Panu Hällfors, panupa@iki.fi
    http://www.iki.fi/panupa/