[lug] Using an LDAP enabled MUA for creating email pop accounts

[Rob Riggs]

Andrew,

If I understand what you are trying to do, the pieces you will
need are:

- LDAP server (and a way to get authentication information
  into it)
- Qmail setup
- a customized, PAMified checkpassword program
- PAM and the LDAP PAM module installed

You may want to look at the vchkpw package to get an idea of how
to set up non-user POP accounts with Qmail. The big magic is in
the PAMified checkpassword file and in configuring Qmail so that
it knows where to put the non-user email. You can find PAMified
checkpassword programs for Qmail POP3 support on qmail.org. Or
you can roll you own in Python using PyPAM... <shameless plug>

You can get PyPAM at http://www.pangalactic.org/PyPAM/

As long as POP is the only service using LDAP for authentication,
you can keep your system users seperate from your POP users.

I've done the multi-domain non-user vchkpw POP accounts using
Qmail. It's not too difficult. But I think you are in for a bit
of development work to get all the pieces together. I really like
the idea of using an LDAP server for authentication. You might
want to talk with tummy.com ( mailto:info at tummy.com ) about
helping you set this up. They consult for a number of ISPs, and
one their specialties is Qmail configuration.

Andrew Diederich wrote:
> 
> We're trying to setup Linux as a pop3 server.  Easy enough.  The difficult
> part is development wants to create the pop user accounts with LDAP.  We're
> initially trying qmail for this; we've also thought about sendmail or
> postfix, but sendmail can be odd and postfix hasn't hit 1.0 yet.   Oh, we're
> using openldap on the linux machine.
> 
> Here's our plan so far: compile qmail with the ldap bits in.  We'd like to
> not have to create user accounts, but I think the ldap stuff requires a user
> account.  This is sad because we need to support the creation of about
> 100,000 accounts right off the bat.  I know that with some of the pop3 bits
> for qmail you don't necessarily need to create user accounts, but I'm not so
> sure about the ldap hook in.
> 
> So -- has anyone here every tried something like this before?  Is our
> thinking and choice of software correct?  Any help is much appreciated.
> 
> -Andrew
> 
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-- 
Rob Riggs
http://www.pangalactic.org/