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

[Paul Makepeace]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 10:41:39AM +0100, Chris Lightfoot wrote:
> > 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'.

I think if you're trying to simulate some FK constraint how about
funnelling all changes through particular scripts that enforce them in
the code or even periodically running SQL to check for errors (e.g.,
<sql>select domain_name from popbox where domain_name not in (select
domain_name from domain)</sql> -- Of course now you'll tell me MySQL
doesn't support subqueries...).

> IMO it's better that the
> system's response to that situation is conservative
> (reject the mail) than liberal (possibly misdirect it).

I agree but I think a per-delivery hit to check just one of any number
of particular db integrity failures is expensive and might lead the less
clueful into a false sense of security (if they even realise it's for
that not just an error which is what I thought it was). YMMV :-)

Paul

-- 
Disconnect from desire