[Vmail-discuss] Webmail for vmail-sql

Chris Lightfoot chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:47:57 +0100


On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 02:30:52PM -0400, Alex Fore wrote:
> Ok, I just got vmail sql up and running on my test-bed email server here,
> after a few confusions and much learning about exim and mysql of which i had
> no previous experience. I am setting up vmail-sql for a email server here,
> and we are currently using poponly user accounts + sendmail + cucipop +
> neomail for webmail access. My question is, does anyone know of a gpl
> webmail application that works nice with vmail-sql, and won't force me to do
> a whole lot of configuration (for each domain -- i am ok with one time major
> config pain in the ass).

Hmm. This comes up from time to time. Paul (Warren) and I
are working on a webmail system which uses IMAP to access
user mailspools, but it's intended more for users with
unix accounts than for virtual domain users. (Mostly
because there's a tpop3d but no timapd, and nor is there
likely to be in the near future; also, there is the [less
serious] question of how you make virtual domain IMAP
work, given that you then need to have directories in
which users store their folders. It would, of course, be
possible to adapt wu-imapd for this purpose, though the
code is _horrendous_ and I for one would not want to do
it. Also it probably wouldn't be secure. </rant>)

> I am considering openwebmail (which is based on neomail), but I think it has
> too many features and will just be a pain in my ass (as the server admin) to
> set up and update whenever we add new domains & users, etc. I like neomail,
> it rules -- plain, simple & pleasing to look at. But it reads directly from
> mail spool files and uses unix authentication. I am no programmer, and the
> extent of my programming experience is shell scripts, and some sql abilites
> (not too good at them yet either).

I had a look at neomail a little while ago, and although
it looks reasonably plausible, the idea of reading direct
from user mailboxes (and its associated security hazards)
left me unimpressed; also, I am a little sceptical of a
program explicitly written as a learning exercise in perl.
OpenWebMail has a POP3 option, but unfortunately POP3
isn't sufficient to build a complete webmail system on.

> I dont think it would be too hard to modify neomail for this task, it has a
> modularized checklogin script (in perl), and it probly would not be hard to
> make it set the senders return addy to user@domain from the login
> user%domain. The second of these i could hack out, but the 1st is a little
> above my perl abilites.

Well... obtaining the location of a user's mailspool from
a vmail-sql installation is as easy as doing

    SELECT domain.path, popbox.mbox_name FROM domain, popbox
        WHERE popbox.domain_name = domain.domain_name
          AND popbox.local_part = $local_part
          AND popbox.domain_name = $domain

The authentication step is fairly simple as well; the code
in the vmail-sql scripts to allow a user to change their
POP box password would be a good place to start for the
login stuff.

-- 
Chris Lightfoot -- www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/
 One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often
 a good thing to do -- and always a clever thing to say
 (Will Durant)