Christopher Chan wrote:
I would like to see some discussion about this as well. I think that
examining the role of vpopmail in today's email landscape has merit.
I'm not intimately familiar with vpopmail's history, but I have used
it a bit as part of the qmail-toaster (see http://www.qmailtoater.com).
vpopmail has potential beyond just email.
I agree. Would you care to elaborate some about this?
It might be useful to start with what vpopmail is not. It's not an
MTA, an MDA, nor MSA (submission), although it interfaces with all of
them. In my mind, vpopmail is an authentication store, which handles
mail related data in support of virtual domains and users. Sort of a
Mail Authentication Agent. It handles all of the data related to
implementing virtual email services (domains and users), although it
doesn't handle an email itself. It also provides APIs/interfaces for
the various other Mail Agents (MTAs, MDAs, etc), so that they can
obtain the data they need to operate according to the data stored in
vpopmail. Perhaps vdommail or simply vmail would have been a more
appropriate name. I kinda like the former as vdom rhymes with freedom.
vmail is taken i believe...Bruce Guenter's multi system user virtual
domain solution whereas vpopmail started out as a single system user
virtual domain solution
I figured vmail was probably taken. I'm not familiar with it, also I
should check it out.
How's this for starters?
In the future (months), I would like to see qmailadmin and vqadmin
consolidated into a single package in support of vpopmail. I don't see
any purpose in having 2 separate web applications.
Longer term (years), I'd like to see vpopmail interface with a FreeIPA
back end server.
Funny that, some time ago I was thinking of the possibility of tying
things into the mysql (or whatever database vpopmail handles like pgsql
- pgsql support is as current as mysql support now right?) vpopmail
database...like samba, apache...but yours is slightly different. I
noticed all the columns that are passwd structure based that were not
quite having their full potential being used.
Tying these various authentication mechanisms together is a worthy
objective, regardless of the implementation software (mysql vs pgsql vs
ldap). The difficulty in any case is to merge the various schemas
together. I believe that ldap has the best chance of accomplishing this,
because of the 'standard' schemas that are available for it, and due to
its nature as a directory vs a database. LDAP is simply a better fit for
this type of application than a database (see
http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/intro.html#LDAP%20vs%20RDBMS).
I also think that FreeIPA has the potential to become the defacto
standard in this area. Making vpopmail able to co-operate/interface with
FreeIPA could very well extend the lifetime of applications that rely on
the vpopmail authentication mechanism. It might be feasible to develop a
vpopmail plugin for FreeIPA at some point (possibly even now). I know
that FreeIPA has a modular architecture such as this, but haven't yet
looked at it in any detail.
--
-Eric 'shubes'
!DSPAM:4a9bdff832712105046433!
