[TriLUG] how do I add an email account

[Joseph Tate]

Cyrus is an alternate IMAP implementation.

It's different from UW-IMAP in that:
A.   It's configurable without having to recompile
B.   It uses maildir instead of Mbox*
C.   It can be configured to use PAM or sasl for authentication.
D.   Users do not require their own home directories.  (Other things 
like spam assassin may require it however).

It's different from Courier in that:
A.   It adds an index to the maildir format to speed access.*
B.   It allows for things like anonymous or shared mailboxes with a full 
  access control list implementation.
C.   It uses SIEVE for mail filtering.
D.   It's scalable: MURDER can be used to host different mailboxes on 
different servers.

It can be downloaded from http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/download/ for 
source distributions, http://www.invoca.ch/pub/packages/cyrus-imapd/ if 
you're using a Red Hat derivative, emerge from gentoo, urpmi from 
Mandrake, yast2 from SuSE, dpkg from debian, etc.

It's not the easiest system to configure and install, but once up and 
running, it's the fastest and most configurable IMAP server I've ever used.

The best HowTo for getting the thing set up and running that I know of 
is http://www.delouw.ch/linux/Postfix-Cyrus-Web-cyradm-HOWTO/html/ 
ignoring the stuff about Web-cyradm (unless you want to do pure virtual 
domain hosting).  There is also lots of good stuff at 
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Cyrus-IMAP.html.

There's a user creation script in Perl on trilug's gForge site: 
http://forge.trilug.org/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=1.  It can 
help you get started on mailbox creation, and adding the user to the 
sasldb.  (It'll also do LDAP, but that part's broken right now).

Joseph
(Cyrus-IMAP admin)

* Cyrus-IMAP's mail storage implementation is maildir, but indexing is 
done on the messages to speed access.

Ralph Blach wrote:
> Jason,
> 
> What is cyrus and how do I get it?
> 
> Chip
> 
> Jason Tower wrote:
> 
>> 1. you can create a local account and disable shell access by setting 
>> the login shell to /bin/false or whatever.  that way it is impossible 
>> to login as that user, ever with the password.  not exactly what you 
>> wanted but it's close enough for a lot of cases.
>>
>> 2. use something like cyrus, which uses its own "subsystem" to handle 
>> mail.  user accounts are defined from within cyrus itself, rather than 
>> using system accounts.
>>
>> jason
>>
>> On Tuesday 27 January 2004 10:27, Ralph Blach wrote:
>>
>>> Hi, I want to add an email account for a person without giving that
>>> person a home directory on my linux box.
>>>
>>> How do I do this?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> Chip