Guus Houtzager wrote:
Hi, On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 01:31, Jernej Horvat wrote:Tuesday 09 of September 2003 08:55, Adrian von Bidder ><snip>(And - sorry, can't help you with an imap server with the mails in a relational db, I don't know of any solution that does this.)I know one. MS Exchange. :] And you know how well that works in case the db goes bananas.....A while back I came across another one, dbmail. Check www.dbmail.org I wanted to give it a go, but unfortunately haven't had time to play with it yet. Does anybody on this list have experience with dbmail?
Yes, I have been experimenting with dbmail. I would say the pros and cons are as follows: Pros: 1. Uses mysql or postgresql backend for storing mail (both headers and bodies). 2. Ease of management for virtual user accounts. Just need to add user details into the database to create a new account. This negates any need to give users unix accounts on the system. 3. A separate application (dbmail-smtp) is used to take emails for configured domains and put them in the database. This runs as a separate user and does not need root permissions since it does not write to the filesystem at all. It simply connects to the database and so only needs permissions at the database level. 4. Similarly, the imap and pop3 servers that are part of dbmail also drop their privileges to simple users and don't need root level access past the initial binding to the 143/110 ports. Cons: 1. No SSL/TLS support for imap or pop3 daemons yet. You could use stunnel to get around this deficiency however, you can't make use of the STARTTLS extension. STARTTLS seems to me to be the way to go if you want to setup secure imap and pop3 daemons. Unfortunately this means that the daemons themselves must support it and the dbmail ones don't yet. 2. dbmail requires a separate alias table listing all the acceptable aliases (email addresses) for the configured domain. You can't make use of your existing alias table (/etc/aliases) since dbmail will check again when it puts the mail in the database. It is a bit of a pain since I would have like to keep the system type aliases (postmaster, abuse etc.) in the /etc/aliases file and have postfix check this first and then route to dbmail for the alias after conversions. I couldn't get this to happen. 3. Currently you can't use LDAP and have dbmail check your directory information for username and passwords. What would be good is to keep all your authentication information in your LDAP server (as is the industry standard it seems) and store your emails in the database. Then have dbmail authenticate through LDAP and retrieve mail from the database. Unfortunately dbmail can't talk to LDAP yet, and I feel it is a bad idea to store authentication information in several different places. I really long for something that will use LDAP for directory type information and use a database to store the emails. It also needs to support the STARTTLS extension for imap and pop3 and run on linux of course. If anyone knows something that will do all this please let me know. Regards. Mark.