Re: mail system in debian-edu

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Andreas B. Mundt]
> After investigating a bit more, I can offer the following with
> minimal changes to our sources:
> 
> Mails in home directory: 
>   When the home directory is created, create a maildir too:
>      mkdir $HOMEDIR/Maildir
>      chown mail:mail $HOMEDIR/Maildir
>      chmod 2700 $HOMEDIR/Maildir
> 
> Alternatively, create a symlink like this:
>  
>      ln -s /var/mail/$USERID $HOMEDIR/Maildir
> 
> Would the latter allow to separate mail-server and home dirs?

Nope.  The mail server would still need access to $HOMEDIR to be able
to look up the symlink.  If the mail server is at some remote ISPs
server, and the home directory is behind a NAT-ing firewall at the
school, there is no sensible way the mail server can get access to the
home directory server.

And it has always been a design prinsible to allow for services to be
moved out of the main-server to separate servers by only using network
protocols to access the services, and by avoiding dependencies between
services as much as possible.  It make it easier to scale the solution
and also to outsouce single services (like the mail service we talk
about here) without having to do many changes to the setup.  The
design goal has been to allow the mail service to be moved to a
separate machine by only changing the DNS entry postoffice.

> The problem with the current setup is, that gosa does not use the
> mailMessageStore attribute which is used by courier-imap. The only way
> to get around that is to use the default which is ~/Maildir. I could
> not find any other way to specify the mail directory. The changes to
> svn are attached.

Do not sound like an acceptable solution to me.  It will bind the home
directory server and the mail server together, and make it very hard
to outsource only the postoffice service.

> Is there a reason why we use courier? I ask because gosa contains
> some administrative tools to maintain a cyrus IMAP server. For a
> standard setup this is probably not needed, but imagine a larger
> setup where several schools served by a central admin.

We use courier and the other mail services because they were part of
the Limacute mail server suite which our mail system is based on.  The
people making Limacute donated their relevant setup and it has not
been changed much since.

> Another related question: Any objections about removing the old
> etc/exim configuration, I guess we only need exim4?

Yes, I guess so too, but have not investigated this part at all. :)

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen