Hi all, Does sendmail support virtual-non-unix-users setup? Any URL about it? I tried to ask in #sendmail channel, but nobody answered. I google around, but, all url only talks about virtual domain and mapping to unix users. Thank you,
On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:09:40 +0700 Fajar Priyanto fajarpri@cbn.net.id wrote:
Does sendmail support virtual-non-unix-users setup?
What is a virtual non-unix user? If the user isn't on the (unix) system, then where would you keep his mail until it's picked up?
On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 20:14 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:09:40 +0700 Fajar Priyanto fajarpri@cbn.net.id wrote:
Does sendmail support virtual-non-unix-users setup?
What is a virtual non-unix user? If the user isn't on the (unix) system, then where would you keep his mail until it's picked up?
---- of course it does...but I use postfix so I can't help with the details but I'm certain you can have users in ldap or sql and a mailstore like cyrus which really couldn't care less if the user has a home directory at all.
My setup (and I heavily recommend it)...
postfix (MTA), openldap (user store), mailscanner (wrapper for spamassasin/clamav/other av), spamassassin (spam scoring), clamav (virus/phishing), sqlgrey (greylisting), cyrus-imapd (imap/pop3 server)
Craig
On Wednesday 05 December 2007 09:14:21 you wrote:
On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:09:40 +0700 What is a virtual non-unix user? If the user isn't on the (unix) system, then where would you keep his mail until it's picked up?
Hello Frank, The user is in some database such as MySQL and the directory is maybe in /home/mail/domain/virtualuserA
On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:30:40 +0700 Fajar Priyanto fajarpri@cbn.net.id wrote:
The user is in some database such as MySQL and the directory is maybe in /home/mail/domain/virtualuserA
Ok, I can see how that would work, but it raises the question of why? Is there some advantage to having the mail in a database instead of simple text files in /var/spool/mail?
On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 21:40 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:30:40 +0700 Fajar Priyanto fajarpri@cbn.net.id wrote:
The user is in some database such as MySQL and the directory is maybe in /home/mail/domain/virtualuserA
Ok, I can see how that would work, but it raises the question of why? Is there some advantage to having the mail in a database instead of simple text files in /var/spool/mail?
---- Once you've used cyrus, you'd never go back to uw-imap or dovecot
Each e-mail is stored as a separate file, not a nasty single mbox file that gets large.
Mail isn't stored in a database, it's simply stored in a highly organized directory structure.
Other phenomenal benefits: - auto features such as auto subscribe, auto create (folders), auto sieve - automatic quotas - user based sieve (server based rules for delivery) - it's actually possible for users to maintain their own filters including vacation filters (horde/ingo and probably other software) - shared mail folders (actual ACL's for folders horde/imp manages nicely) - public mailboxes - scheduled features such as indexing/purging, easily configurable (nice) - fast (very fast) - support for user accounts in /etc/passwd or ldap or sql
Craig
Craig White wrote:
On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 21:40 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:30:40 +0700 Fajar Priyanto fajarpri@cbn.net.id wrote:
The user is in some database such as MySQL and the directory is maybe in /home/mail/domain/virtualuserA
Ok, I can see how that would work, but it raises the question of why? Is there some advantage to having the mail in a database instead of simple text files in /var/spool/mail?
Once you've used cyrus, you'd never go back to uw-imap or dovecot
How is cyrus today?
I had to save a pal from Cyrus 3 years or so ago. He had a problem with corrupt files (but not the maildirs) and finally I just got him to migrate things over to vpopmail.
He is off vpopmail today making his own mailstore structure with postfix and dovecot.
On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 12:08 +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:
Craig White wrote:
On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 21:40 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:30:40 +0700 Fajar Priyanto fajarpri@cbn.net.id wrote:
The user is in some database such as MySQL and the directory is maybe in /home/mail/domain/virtualuserA
Ok, I can see how that would work, but it raises the question of why? Is there some advantage to having the mail in a database instead of simple text files in /var/spool/mail?
Once you've used cyrus, you'd never go back to uw-imap or dovecot
How is cyrus today?
I had to save a pal from Cyrus 3 years or so ago. He had a problem with corrupt files (but not the maildirs) and finally I just got him to migrate things over to vpopmail.
---- Cyrus is awesome - though it can be a bit scary to rebuild the mailboxes.db
Then again, it isn't that hard to do but when everyone is breathing down your neck, it makes the task seem daunting. ----
He is off vpopmail today making his own mailstore structure with postfix and dovecot.
---- There's nothing wrong with dovecot, it just lacks features that you didn't know were around until you fooled with cyrus and once you get the features going, you won't go anywhere else.
Craig
Christopher Chan wrote:
How is cyrus today?
I've been using Cyrus for about 6 years now, the biggest pain was upgrading from 1.x to 2.1, which was fairly complicated, had to test it a half dozen times in vmware before migrating the real deal.
Never really had a problem with cyrus that I can recall. I've always stored passwords in LDAP(authenticate via PAM). I've never been fond of the sasl stuff cyrus likes to use, but once it's all disabled and put in plain text mode it's fine.
Very fast, I like the acls, on my home mail server I have about 150 accounts, all of which I can subscribe to from my main account, some very basic sieve scripts for filtering spamassasin mails to a central spam folder. I use squirrelmail for my email client, which gives me a convenient little drop down box which I can choose my "from:" address.
My latest mail systems are running courier(Maildir) because they have a NFS back-end and Cyrus doesn't play well with NFS last I checked. Certainly on the surface at least courier doesn't seem as powerful as Cyrus, but for basic stuff it seems to work fine. I haven't gone in depth in either Cyrus 2.x (short of basic sieve, everything else is the same stuff I was using in Cyrus 1.x), or Courier, my needs are pretty basic.
Mostly have stuck with Cyrus on my own stuff since I've been using it for so long, and haven't had a reason to migrate. The full text index stuff in cyrus sounds cool but it seems you have to do a full re-index(which takes a long time on my system) in order for it to be effective, perhaps there is a way to dynamically update as messages are moved around. I haven't used quotas in cyrus in 5 years, but worked fine at the time.
My personal email server(about 4 users including myself, 99% of usage is me) stores about 300k emails, so nothing spectacular.
I don't recall ever having data corruption with Cyrus. On paper at least Cyrus looks like a pretty bad ass system, though I don't know if I'll ever want to be supporting an email infrastructure for a large enough site to really take advantage of it(with all of the horizontal scaling it seems to be able to do in the newer versions).
My personal servers run debian, I haven't tried cyrus on CentOS.
nate
--On Tuesday, December 04, 2007 8:57 PM -0700 Craig White craigwhite@azapple.com wrote:
Once you've used cyrus, you'd never go back to uw-imap or dovecot
Each e-mail is stored as a separate file, not a nasty single mbox file that gets large.
Note that the competitors can use maildir, so this isn't a Cyrus-only feature.
But AFAIK this comes at a storage penalty: Many small files will waste space approximately equal to half the storage allocation unit times the number of files. Or is there a way to mitigate this on ext3? (I don't want to go to Reiser.)
on 12/5/2007 3:48 PM Kenneth Porter spake the following:
--On Tuesday, December 04, 2007 8:57 PM -0700 Craig White craigwhite@azapple.com wrote:
Once you've used cyrus, you'd never go back to uw-imap or dovecot
Each e-mail is stored as a separate file, not a nasty single mbox file that gets large.
Note that the competitors can use maildir, so this isn't a Cyrus-only feature.
But AFAIK this comes at a storage penalty: Many small files will waste space approximately equal to half the storage allocation unit times the number of files. Or is there a way to mitigate this on ext3? (I don't want to go to Reiser.)
You can format a filesystem with whatever block sizes you want. 1k blocks will waste less space then 4k blocks, but will add overhead on larger filesystems. But any filesystem would suffer this to some extent. Some more than others since their minimum and maximum block sizes are different.. A database would probably be the most space efficient, but harder to set up since it is less used.
On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 15:48 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
--On Tuesday, December 04, 2007 8:57 PM -0700 Craig White craigwhite@azapple.com wrote:
Once you've used cyrus, you'd never go back to uw-imap or dovecot
Each e-mail is stored as a separate file, not a nasty single mbox file that gets large.
Note that the competitors can use maildir, so this isn't a Cyrus-only feature.
---- actually, cyrus doesn't use maildir but it's not altogether that different in concept...but of course, there really is no standard definition for maildir but what was implemented by vpopmail seems have been adopted by courier and dovecot ----
But AFAIK this comes at a storage penalty: Many small files will waste space approximately equal to half the storage allocation unit times the number of files. Or is there a way to mitigate this on ext3? (I don't want to go to Reiser.)
---- Reiser seems to have lost most of it's lustre but there are of course other types of storage.
Craig
Craig White wrote:
On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 15:48 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
--On Tuesday, December 04, 2007 8:57 PM -0700 Craig White craigwhite@azapple.com wrote:
Once you've used cyrus, you'd never go back to uw-imap or dovecot
Each e-mail is stored as a separate file, not a nasty single mbox file that gets large.
Note that the competitors can use maildir, so this isn't a Cyrus-only feature.
actually, cyrus doesn't use maildir but it's not altogether that different in concept...but of course, there really is no standard definition for maildir but what was implemented by vpopmail seems have been adopted by courier and dovecot
vpopmail does not implement maildir. Maildir is a DJB invention and vpopmail just automates certain aspects of creating a mailstore based on maildir. courier and dovecot choose to support this open format along with other mtas besides qmail, where it was first implemented.
But AFAIK this comes at a storage penalty: Many small files will waste space approximately equal to half the storage allocation unit times the number of files. Or is there a way to mitigate this on ext3? (I don't want to go to Reiser.)
Reiser seems to have lost most of it's lustre but there are of course other types of storage.
Ah, kernel politics and whatever...nice that such things get in the way of technology. Look at zfs (okay, not the best whatever but the thing is sweet to use) and they broke all the 'rules'. We could have had a great filesystem plus compression and a whole lot more were it not for kernel politics. Then there was the recent CK thing.
Fajar Priyanto wrote:
On Wednesday 05 December 2007 09:14:21 you wrote:
On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:09:40 +0700 What is a virtual non-unix user? If the user isn't on the (unix) system, then where would you keep his mail until it's picked up?
Hello Frank, The user is in some database such as MySQL and the directory is maybe in /home/mail/domain/virtualuserA
You can modify sendmail to use a mysql database for authentication/verification and local delivery. Sample in libsmdb IIRC.
Or you can choose to use a different lda that supports databases such as maildrop and a milter for user authentication/verification.
Fajar Priyanto wrote:
Hi all, Does sendmail support virtual-non-unix-users setup? Any URL about it? I tried to ask in #sendmail channel, but nobody answered. I google around, but, all url only talks about virtual domain and mapping to unix users. Thank you,
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Hi, Yes Feature virtusertable will do what you want. Try http://www.sendmail.org/tips/virtual-hosting.php to start
Good luck
On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 09:09:40AM +0700, Fajar Priyanto wrote:
Hi all, Does sendmail support virtual-non-unix-users setup? Any URL about it? I tried to ask in #sendmail channel, but nobody answered. I google around, but, all url only talks about virtual domain and mapping to unix users.
What do you want to do? If you have a mailbox system that does not depend on unix users existing (the Cyrus IMAPd is such a critter, complex though it is) then Sendmail can deliver to those mailboxes.
--On Tuesday, December 04, 2007 9:24 PM -0500 David Mackintosh David.Mackintosh@xdroop.com wrote:
What do you want to do? If you have a mailbox system that does not depend on unix users existing (the Cyrus IMAPd is such a critter, complex though it is) then Sendmail can deliver to those mailboxes.
It's my understanding that sendmail doesn't deliver to mailboxes, but depends on a local mailer (the "mail delivery agent", or MDA, and typically procmail) to perform that function.
On Tue, Dec 04, 2007 at 07:10:00PM -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
What do you want to do? If you have a mailbox system that does not depend on unix users existing (the Cyrus IMAPd is such a critter, complex though it is) then Sendmail can deliver to those mailboxes.
It's my understanding that sendmail doesn't deliver to mailboxes, but depends on a local mailer (the "mail delivery agent", or MDA, and typically procmail) to perform that function.
Strictly speaking you are correct, in the Cyrus case it is lmptd doing the actual delivery.
Fajar Priyanto wrote:
Hi all, Does sendmail support virtual-non-unix-users setup? Any URL about it? I tried to ask in #sendmail channel, but nobody answered. I google around, but, all url only talks about virtual domain and mapping to unix users.
Do you mean a single unix account that will be used as the uid/gid for processes that will store and read the mail store for the virtual users?
The system has to have at least a unix account for permissions and ownership unless you plan to the emails somewhere other than the filesystem like a database.
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Christopher Chan -
Clint Dilks -
Craig White -
David Mackintosh -
Fajar Priyanto -
Frank Cox -
Kenneth Porter -
nate -
Scott Silva