need organizational hint

[Phil Howard]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 10:53:21AM -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

| >5.  No LDAP or other network based user directory.  The user
| >    directory should be something simple and basic, like a DB file.
| >    But it will need to include the data for the user's rules,
| >    even if in a separate DB.
| 
| So your going to basically recreate a broken version of LDAP?

I won't be creating that which I don't want.  What I do want is
directly access data within minimal overhead not only for the
mail system to access, but also for other programs I am doing
to access and manage.  The email is only a part of it.  I have
looked at LDAP, but it adds too much complication.


| >6.  Authenticate the same set of users with the same password via
| >    a control panel web page.  But I do NOT want each web request
| >    to go trying to proxy the authentication via IMAP.  I want it
| >    to get it "direct" (whatever that might mean).  What tools are
| >    there for that?  This would be the control panel users use to
| >    do things like control their blacklist / whitelist rules.
| 
| SmartSieve provides a nice UI for users to use, but only if your using Sieve.

My intent is to have a completely integrated UI for everything.  So
unless SmartSieve does everything I want to do already (unlikely),
then what I need is underlying facilities to function with the UI
I create (I already expect to do this part).

How is Sieve implemented?  Is there a set of patches for Postfix or
does it play its own role in as MTA or SMTP front-end?  The docs I
see only describe a language.


| > 7.  Tagged email addresses where user at example.com might get mail
| >     addressed to user-foo at example.com.  If the user allows this,
| >     but does not set up the mailbox for that address, it falls
| >     back to the first box found by stripping off each tag part
| >     one at a time (until it gets to the user's root mailbox which
| >     has to always exist).
| 
| This is default behaviour, AFAIK.  At least that has always forked for us
| without doing anything.  Except the notation is "user+folder.folder...@" but I
| suppose you might be able to adjust the "+"

I've already adjusted it in Postfix to use "-".  I'd actually like to
adjust it to use either "-" or "+" by user choice.  I bet that will
require a source patch to various things.


| >In order to do number 4 when Postfix is receiving the SMTP connections
| >then Postfix will somehow have to know what users exist within Cyrus.
| >Is that what SASL is supposed to be able to do (in addition to its
| >declared role of authentication)?
| 
| No I don't think so.  SASL just does authentication, it does not provide a
| namespace.  That is what LDAP is for.

I do not see how it can possibly function without a namespace.


| > I would even consider writing a direct (non-queuing) SMTP front-end
| > to effect the blacklisting / whitelistying rules and the non-existant
| > user rejection, and then it makes a live connection to Cyrus to do
| > the actual delivery passed straight through (and responses at that
| > point passed back).  I know if I did it this would I would have very
| > clear control over the behaviour at this point.
| 
| This is an awful lot of work (and harder than you might think) when very good
| pre-existing, proven, and debugged solutions exist.

I'm going to be doing the web UI part of it myself from scratch.
That means whatever mechanisms are used will have to be able to
accept the data about all of this by some programming interface
means.  If you were to make a list of all the packages I would
need to do that, how many are there besides the basic Cyrus and
Postfix?  I have no intent to use any UI components that are
pre-packaged.


| ftp://ftp.kalamazoolinux.org/pub/pdf/Cyrus.pdf

I'll have to look at that later on (PDF reader isn't working at the
moment due to desktop re-install this afternoon).

-- 
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| Phil Howard - KA9WGN |   Dallas   | http://linuxhomepage.com/ |
| phil-nospam at ipal.net | Texas, USA | http://ka9wgn.ham.org/    |
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