Re: POP3 accounts
On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 12:02, Robert Cates wrote:
> I would like to get a job at a nearby ISP, and therefore I'm trying to
> learn more on various (technical) aspects of the business. So I would
> really appreciate it if somebody would explain to me how I for example
> can have as many as 50 or so POP3 accounts with an ISP, when I really
> have only one real/login account. I've really learned alot from my
> Debian 3.0 server I've setup, but some things just seem to elude me.
> Would it be in the POP server configuration, like Qpopper? Because I
> can't imagine the ISP will setup 50 seperate accounts for each POP3
> account, and then that times 1000+ real customer accounts.
Well, the way I have done it is by not using system accounts for email
at all. All mail is owned by the "mail" user on the system, and the
various POP boxes are stored in a MySQL database.
The SMTP server looks up mail accounts in the MySQL database, and stores
email (in maildir format) to /var/spool/mail/virtual/domain.com/user/.
The POP3 server also works against the MySQL database, and fetches the
email from the correct mailbox.
I use Exim as an SMTP server, and tpop3d as a POP3 server. Both support
looking up account info in a MySQL database.
There are many different ways to handle this, but it's always done by
looking up mail accounts in a different backend than the system account
database (for example flatfiles, LDAP, MySQL and so on).
--
Erik Grinaker <erikg@wired-networks.net>
http://erikg.wired-networks.net/
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of
life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be
enthusiastic about."
-- Albert Einstein
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