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

[Chris Lightfoot]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 01:39:45AM -0700, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 09:04:43AM +0100, Chris Lightfoot wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> I don't quite understand the point here or what you're trying to
> safeguard. If it's malicious/accident-prone users adding dud entries to
> forwarder then they could equally add to domain and I don't see what
> good this does. Or am I missing something here?

I'm not sure it's a well thought out position, but my
point is that in MySQL you can readily construct databases
which are inconsistent in the sense of not satisfying
`foreign key constraints'. IMO it's better that the
system's response to that situation is conservative
(reject the mail) than liberal (possibly misdirect it).

> That dual join is an extra expense. Which I haven't benchmarked... (this
> whole email is mostly aesthetic concerns anyway).

Yeah, that's a valid point too.

> > (I note in passing[1] that [RFC822] `*' is just as valid a
> > local-part as `_default_'.
> 
> Some addresses are more valid than others, at least as far as RFC822
> and the myriad interpretations of it by clients & servers are
> concerned:-)

Oh, absolutely.

-- 
Chris Lightfoot -- www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/
 ``The peak years of our intellectual development are between the
   ages of four and eighteen. At age four, we knew all the questions;
   at eighteen, all the answers.''