[TriLUG] dotted username?

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Brian Henning wrote:

>Hi Folks,
>  I'm setting up an in-house e-mail server to apply some e-mail filtering
>and spam management.  There are currently some usernames and/or aliases at
>our current (3rd-party) e-mail server contain dots in the username (such as
>joe.blow[at]strutmasters.com).  Apparently such a username is not a valid
>UNIX username, so how do I create a mailbox that has a dot in its name?  I'd
>like to avoid changing anyone's e-mail address at all costs, really.
>I'm running sendmail on FC2.
>
>Thanks in advance!
>
>Cheers,
>~Brian
>
>----------------
>Brian A. Henning
>Strutmasters.com
>866.597.2397
>----------------
>
>
>  
>
Well depending on your mail server setup, things can vary a bit, but 
generally to achieve this you should seperate the concept of usernames 
and email addresses.  For example, let's say my email address needs to 
be aaron.joyner at example.com - my username would be asjoyner (or what 
ever is appropriate for your naming scheme) and there is a mapping from 
aaron.joyner at example.com to the local user asjoyner.  In Sendmail, 
investigate the virtusertable feature, in postfix investigate the 
virtual_maps entry in main.cf for basically the same functionality.  
These files allow you to define this type of setup as simply as:
aaron.joyner at example.com   asjoyner
brian.henning at example.com   bahenning
etc

Hope that helps as a starting point!
Aaron S. Joyner