Hi Benjamin Benjamin Tomhave writes:
> (Cross-posting to vchkpw and qmailadmin mailing lists.) > > I'm currently running qmailadmin 1.0.25 and vpopmail 5.3.20 (been waiting > for a 5.4 release). When users login to qmailadmin with their personal, > non-postmaster accounts and create a forward, a .qmail file is created in > the account/ directory, at the same level as Maildir. Correct. It's only recently that I've been playing with a version of qmailadmin new enough to do that, and it came as a surprise. I can think of two reasons why such functionality may have been added. The first is that it allows users to set up forwards for their mailbox without having to pester the domain administrator to do it for them. This could have also been achieved by having qmailadmin permit a user to create/modify/delete a .qmail-username file ONLY if it matched their mailbox name, but this way allows the domain administrator to over-ride the user's forward with an alias (although setting up an alias for a user that delivers to that user's maildir using qmailadmin requires some devious trickery, it is possible). The second is that it appears to be the way intended (but, as far as I can see, undocumented) for users to enable sqwebmail mailfilters. If their forward contains: | /usr/local/bin/maildrop .maildirfilter then vdelivermail will hand over delivery to maildrop. The only other way I know of invoking maildrop is to manually edit the .qmail-default file, thereby sacrificing vdelivermail functionality and running the risk of a careless domain administrator undoing the maildrop change by playing with the catch-all settings. Manually putting maildrop into .qmail-default is not an option in our usage where we have many clients each with virtual domains, some of whom want to be able to use all the features of qmailadmin including whether to have mail to unknown users bounced or deleted or to change which account acts as catch-all. But I also feel that instructing users that if they want to use mail filters they have to type in the above delivery instruction into the forward is not a tenable option. Some of the users we get are not capable of typing their own e-mail address into their e-mail clients correctly. One of them appeared to not even know what her own surname was, having called herself [EMAIL PROTECTED] when in fact she was [EMAIL PROTECTED] (no, she was not recently married or divorced). So I hacked my copy of vdelivermail so that if it couldn't find a .qmail file in the user's directory it then looked for a .maildirfilter file in that directory. If it found the .maildirfilter file then it pretended that it had just read a .qmail file containing the above delivery instruction. That meant that if anyone set up an sqwebmail filter it automatically worked without them having to create that awkward forward. It also meant the user could temporarily over-ride the filters by setting a forward if they wanted. I did submit a patch to Tom but he didn't say whether or not he intended to use it. BTW, I did read somewhere that qmailadmin developers were considering dropping aliases because an alias bypasses the user's .qmail file if they have one, but a forward does not (because it gets re-injected into qmail). I consider that to be a feature rather than a bug. Imagine a sales team, where the alias sales@ expands to the maildirs of all the members of the team. One of the team sets up a vacation autoreply in sqwebmail. Because sales@ is an alias, mail to the sales team bypasses his filter, which is exactly what you want. If qmailadmin drops aliases then that would have to be done with a forward and mail to the sales team would get an unwanted vacation reply. > This does not appear to be getting processed correctly as the messages > appear to disappear into oblivion (w/o so much as a bounce). It works for me, although I'm using vpopmail 5.3.23. I don't know if it was broken in some earlier versions. Are you sure the contents of the .qmail file are sensible? > I've typically always manually setup forward as .qmail-account in the > domain's base directory, not through use of .qmail files in the user's > directory. You still can do that if you're the system admin or the domain admin. It's just that now users can do it themselves but the admin can over-ride them with a "traditional" alias if necessary. > Second, is use of the .qmail file the best/correct implementation, It is an additional feature which permits additional functionality, namely users being able to set up a forward without having to ask the domain admin to do it for them. If your domain has a lot of users who frequently want temporary forwards, you'll appreciate this. > or was this "fixed" in 1.0.26 (which I haven't had time to compile yet) > by reverting back to the .qmail-account format in the domain's > base directory? If you use qmailadmin as the domain administrator you still have the "traditional" .qmail-account. -- Paul Allen Softflare Support
