murder and autocreate (I know it is not supported)

[Andrew Morgan]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Dave McMurtrie wrote:

>>> What Ken is working on isn't specific to autocreate.  Rather, he's
>>> working to integrate IDM into our environment.  We need a way for our
>>> identity management system to be able to simply connect to a Cyrus
>>> frontend and issue a create command and have something useful happen.
>>
>> I've never understood this idea of why anything that has anything to
>> do
>> with user management should _ever_ have anything to do with mailbox
>> creation.
>>
>> Mailboxes (i.e. the default first INBOX for every user) should
>> always be
>> created _automatically_ as needed for every valid user.
>>
>> The easiest way to do this is to trust the mail delivery system to
>> have
>> already verified the existence of every authorized mail user.  This is
>> quite safe to do because if there is any reason you can't do so then
>> your mail system is broken, by definition, anyway.  (i.e. if your MTA
>> cannot be trusted to only accept and to deliver mail for valid users
>> then it will no doubt be generating backscatter and it will be
>> abused by
>> those who do such dastardly things)
>>
>> Why make everything far more complicated than it needs to be?
>> Especially things related to user management?
>>
>
> A valid point to mailbox creation, but what would delete the mailbox
> when a student graduates?

It is really quite trivial to write small scripts (perl, php, python, etc) 
to manage Cyrus mailboxes.  I don't know why folks do all this work by 
hand...

I don't like the thought of Cyrus creating mailboxes on its own.  One can 
simply add mailbox creation to all the other steps of provisioning a new 
account (creating an LDAP entry, making a home directory, setting quotas, 
etc).

Even if I were to make accounts "by hand", I would still write a script to 
do all the steps so it is repeatable!  :)

 	Andy