suggestion need to design an email system.

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 22:28 -0700, Scott M. Likens wrote:
> ...
> I debated writing a gui for Cyrus for administration, but I realized 
> that people implement Cyrus in so many different ways.  Kerberos, LDAP, 
> *SQL, various forms of PAM.  Then you add in virtual domains, and how 
> you might want alias's and might not, and different MTA support... and I 
> just caved.

Right, I've gone through the same thought process.  The only way to make
a *good* admin tool [IMHO] is to, to some extent, dictate how the system
is architected.  Since Open Source would generally reject that... no
good admin tools. :(   This is the primary advantage of M$ solutions:
they dictate generally how it will work, what components will be used,
and thus can provide [I must admit] rather beautiful admin interfaces
and capacity planning tools. 

> Creating a basic way to support Cyrus is extremely easy in ruby, has the 
> ability to create mailboxes easily, delete them, set permissions and set 
> quotas.

We've created one in PHP, and I've worked on one in .NET,  so I don't
think the platform really matters.  But each ends up welded to its
site's policies and configuration in a myriad of little ways.

> That would be the basics, but once you create a web-ui to support the 
> basics.  You could write it up in Ruby on Rails in a couple hours to 
> cover the basics and get the job done.  But it's tying the 
> authentication system and MTA into the app that would be the hassle.  :(
> (now I write this i don't know why I did... but I did)

Maybe it has improved but when I surveyed the available management
interfaces [years ago now] most of them were pretty scary in terms of
security [apache/wwwrun needed to be able to execute commands, no
support for "real" authorization (like Kerberos), etc...].  This stems I
think from the fact that configuration of most services can't be done
via an API but only by mucking about in files and restarting or at least
HUP'ing important processes.  It just doesn't lend itself to good
manageability.
-- 
          Consonance: an Open Source .NET OpenGroupware client.
 Contact:awilliam at whitemiceconsulting.com   http://freshmeat.net/projects/consonance/