[NTLUG:Discuss] Virtual Mail Users

[Dave Augustus]

There are 2 ways of doing what you want:

1) create a normal account on the box and set their shell to be
/bin/false ( and other variations)

2) use courier.imap or cyrus for your email server- then within each of
these, you can store user information in one of 3 containers: berkely db
files, mysql or ldap.

Definitely the second method is more complicated but provides additional
benefits such as "ability to host multiple domains without conflict",
"no passwd/group entries" and "single account can be used for multiple
purposes."  Your system will then only require user entries in
passwd/group that are needed for the daemons, not the users.

I think that the first method could "bite" you when you have 2 users
that should have the same username but they are located in different
domain names. For example, most decent email admins will create a
postmaster account for each domain that is hosted. Certainly that
wouldn't work in the first instance.

Enjoy!
Dave




On Thu, 2004-04-15 at 14:19, Scott Hollomon wrote:
> I am running sendmail on RH 9 and would like to provide my users with POP3 
> accounts without providing them with an account they could use to get a shell 
> on the mail server.  I've googled extensively, but the information I've 
> gotten is obtuse at best.  I am authenticating the users using Cyrus SASL 
> both for sending and receiving.  Any suggestions or pointers to documentation 
> are appreciated.
> 
> Sorry if this shows up twice.