long user names for POP mailboxes

["Al Youngwerth" <alberty@apexxtech.com>]

I'm pretty sure that what I want to do is possible because I know some ISPs
do it. 

Here's what I want: to allow users to have an e-mail address and a pop
mailbox that is greater than 8 characters. For example:
MyFirstName.MyLastName@mydomain.com.

Here's my setup: smail 3.2.3, fetchmail 3.9.8 and the standard in.pop3d
that comes with Debian. I mirror mailboxes at my ISP on my local Debian
machine. That is, fetchmail downloads mail from pop mailboxes at the isp
and puts them in "mirrored" pop mailboxes on my Debian box. The users on
the LAN then access the pop server on the Debian box to get their mail. 

The key here is that I want the users on the LAN to be able to access a pop
mailbox on the Debian system just like they access the mailbox at the ISP:
MyFirstName.MyLastName.

The problem is that to access a pop mailbox, the mailbox name must be a
valid user in /etc/passwd and usernames in /etc/passwd are limited to 8
chars (by login I think). 

I know I can have users send and receive mail with the long mail names by
setting up an alias for smail and using a fetcmail line of the form:
	
	user "MyFirstName.MyLastName" there is "MyFirstN" here

but the users would still have to setup their clients with a pop mailbox
name of "MyFirstN".

How can I do this? Do I have to recompile login to allow for longer user
names? Is that a "bad thing"? Is there another pop mail package that has an
alternate authentication procedure or an "alias" file (for mapping login
names to mailbox names?)?

Thanks in advance for any replies,

Al Youngwerth
alberty@apexxtech.com


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