[Vmail-discuss] Finally... vmail-0.4

[Chris Lightfoot]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 12:52:35AM -0700, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 01:41:43PM +0100, Paul Warren wrote:
> > vmail-sql 0.4 is now available from:
> > 
> > 	http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/vmail-sql/
> 
> Cool.
> 
> 1. I noticed some SQL things,
> 
> In README,
> 
>   query = "select remote_name from forwarder, domain where local_part = '$local_part' and
> forwarder.domain_name = domain.domain_name and domain.domain_name = '$domain'"
> 
> is equivalent to:
>         select remote_name from forwarder
>           where local_part = '$local_part' and domain_name = '$domain'
> 
> Ditto the other query.

True for Oracle, where presumably you have foreign-key
constraints; but not for MySQL, where one could put rows
into the forwarder table which didn't correspond to `real'
domains. So from your PoV, yes; from ours, not quite,
because of paranoia about audit trails.

> 2. In default user, "local_part = '_default_'" how do you feel about
>    changing that to '*'? The reasoning is a) people could conceivably
>    want _default_ as a valid email b) it translates directly into
>    something exim can understand in its lsearch* lookup type. (Can
>    anyone tell b) is the real motivator? :-) Why I'm doing this is
>    trying to put all the data in CDB format generated from a database on
>    account of exim's constantly re-exec'ing/re-connecting architecture
>    which mitigates against targetting a database in a big system.

Well, I don't think that s/^_default_$/*/ is going to
impose a big burden on your dump-to-CDB argument.

(I note in passing[1] that [RFC822] `*' is just as valid a
local-part as `_default_'.  Of course, if you are the sort
of person who goes about putting underscores and asterisks
in email addresses, you deserve all of the bad things
which are going to happen to you as a result....)

---
1. See? I'm a nice person. I could have gone for the
   really obvious, bad pun....

-- 
Chris Lightfoot -- www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/
 In view of the fact that God limited man's intelligence,
 it is a pity that He did not also limit his stupidity (Adenauer)