[Vmail-discuss] POP-and-SEND with vmail

Chris Lightfoot chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tue, 17 Jul 2001 17:35:32 +0100


On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 12:24:56PM -0400, Marcin Pacyna wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I'm wondering what others are doing for POP-and-SEND when using vmail
> (w/tpop3d) setup.  I'm thinking of switching to vmail but that's one of the
> reasons that I haven't done it yet.

I guess you mean what I think of as `POP-before-SMTP
relaying'? AFAIAA, there are two basic approaches:

    1. have some long-running process which watches the
       log files, and then writes into a table of hosts
       allowed to relay when it sees an incoming
       connection to tpop3d get authenticated;

    2. some sort of event-driven scheme; this can be done
       (for instance) by modifying the code in tpop3d's
       main.c to authorise relaying immediately before the
       daemon forks and drops privileges; or use auth_perl
       or auth_other to do the same thing. In the latter
       case you'd (obviously) need to write an
       authenticator.

A number of people have asked me about things of this
sort, and I suspect I will introduce a way to hook the
functionality in to tpop3d in a neat way. Meanwhile, I
believe that previous posters have had success with the
first (ugly) approach above.

Out of interest, how do you set up permission to relay?
How does it get revoked (presumably a little while after
it is granted)?

(If I've missed the point completely, well, I hope this
email has been informative anyway....)

-- 
Chris Lightfoot -- www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/
 ``What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he were a man, but if
   he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?''
   (Richard Feynman)