Re: Completely Virtual Mail Server

[Lee W <debian-user@unassemble.co.uk>]

<snip>
> 
>     The cyrus imap server has a filtering mechanism called "sieve".
>     Since cyrus stores all messages in its own message store not
>     relying on the unix filesystem for ownership and permissions it
>     seems like it would work well for virtual users.
> 
> HTH,
> -D
> 
<snip>

Thanks for the suggestion.  I did look into cyrus however I dismissed it
because it did not appear to support SQL databases, which almost all of
Postfix lookup tables can be read from.

If I knew more about the C programming language I would consider writing
either a patch to the virtual MDA of postfix to allow it do filtering or
write a completely difference MDA altogether.

I though of a couple of other ways I could maybe do this, but both have
major drawbacks.

    1. Run the Mail server in a chroot, therefore with a different
    /etc/passwd file for the virtual users.
    
    2. Use the virtual MDA from Postfix but have the mail delivered to
    temporary mailboxes.  Then run a cron job to periodically check for
    mail, filter it and deliver any remaining mail to the correct
    mailbox.  I believe procmail can have a home directory specfied on
    its command line using the "-m" option.  This would also allow
    additional features such as auto-replies to be used.
    
Regards

Lee