Sendmail: virtual user?

[inetd]

I have configured sendmail in RH8. Can I set a virtual email user such that there is no such linux account in RH 8?

Thanks.

 

[RhythmAce]

Yes you can. That's what it's there for. You don't need to actually have a user with the name webmaster, sales or info. These do however, need to resolve to a real user on your system.

 

[inetd]

Well, then how can I make the linux to hold multi email domain? How can I do the followings:

1. abc@aaa.com and abc@bbb.com is held in my email server and they are different owner.

2. How can they check their email through pop3 with username abc or abc@aaa.com and abc@bbb.com?


Thanks.

 

[RhythmAce]

Because of the way smtp and pop3 work. This is a little hard to do. Once mail make it to your server, the domain part of the address gets stripped off and you are just left with the user name. The same is true for pop3. The way most MTA's, sendmail included, is to allow virtual names. The drawback is that each virtual name must resolve to a unique user name on your system. There is software out there that use their own user database but these cost anywhere from several hundred to a couple thousand dollars. The best a poor man can do is use something like the virtusertable. This way you can have something like the following:

webmaster@abc.com joe (joe is a system user)
webmaster@xyz.com jane@her-isp.com

You can have an unlimited amount of virtual users. The nice thing about this is they don't need a real account on your system. If you do have users that only need mail access, they can have a null home directory and no shell access. There is a ray of hope however. I'm looking into a program called VxMail (you can vind it at

http://www.tucows.com

). This program uses its own database and will handle multiple domains with common user names. It claims to be able to run under debian and redhat, but I haven't been able to compile it yet. The other problem I am having with it is most of the docs are in German so help is hard to find.I was also at sendmail.org an clicked on the link for "Sendmail-SQL project". If I come across something that will do the trick, I will post it here and in the sendmail forums.

 

[Newposter]

Uh oh. If I understand this thread correctly, as I set up a server with Sendmail, I can't have multiple domains with the same username (john@domain1.com and john@domain2.com) on the same server? Please tell me it isn't so. Newposter
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

 

[RhythmAce]

If your are john and you want mail for both domains to go to you, then you have no problems. If there are 2 johns, then they will get each others mail depending on who pops theirs first. All mail for john@alldomains.com goes to /var/spool/mail/john. Right now the only way I can think of to get around it, is to create virtualusers and point them to unique user names or other e-mail addresses.
I am no expert on this issue but I host a few domains and have been trying to resolve this issue. I'm just passing on the information as I understand it.