OT: POP and virtual users

[Steve Campbell]

Ken A wrote:
>
>
> On 3/30/2010 7:22 AM, Steve Campbell wrote:
>> I've got a question about how POP works (if at all) with sendmail
>> virtual users.
>>
>> Here's the situation:
>> I've got a user that has an account on one of our hosted domains. That
>> user's account is "mail at thedomain.com". For now, it's on another server,
>> but I'm getting ready to move it to a more current server. I'll create a
>> virtual user in the virtusertable "mail at thedomain.com
>> mailxxx at thedomain.com" so as not to interfere with anything related to
>> "mail" on the server.
>
> Sendmail virtualuser table maps/resolves addressA at customerdomain.tld 
> to addressB at localhost, assuming you are on a mail hub where pop3 
> lives. customerdomain.tld also needs to be in the local-host-names file.
>
>>
>> When I set up the account on the user's machine, I'm having problems
>> seeing how I should set this up. They only use our server for incoming
>> mail, and use another ISP for outgoing. So here's the snag. The account
>> will remain mail at thedomain.com. Setting up their SMTP server is not a
>> problem as it will stay the same. When I set up the POP server pointing
>> to our server, when the MUA requests retrieval of mail, will POP use the
>> virtual table entry "mail at thedomain.com" to retrieve mail from the
>> mailxxx mailbox? These accounts are UNIX users on the server, BTW.
>>
>
> No, the user would be checking the addressB unix account. There are 
> other ways to do this, of course, but this is the standard sendmail 
> virtual user setup.
>
>
>> If not, how is the best way to set up all of this? Up until now, I've
>> not needed to worry about this problem, and the old server users
>> linuxconf (really old, huh?) to handle this. I don't think the user
>> really wants to change their email account name, and since they're
>> paying for it, I kinda have to oblige.
>
> Users generally just care about their email addresses, but ymmv.
> Your pop server may be able to alias things for you too. 
> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/VirtualUsers
>
> Ken
>
>>
>> Thanks for any enlightenment.
>>
>> Steve Campbell
>>
>
Thanks Ken,

So maybe I'm making this a little more complicated than it really is. I 
guess I never really thought much about what the setting in the 
properties of an email account really meant, since most of the time, all 
user's info remained the same.

Just to verify what I think I finally am seeing, there are 3 entries in 
any account setup. The email address, the reply address, and the server 
name/password. The first two would/should be the email account that the 
world would see as a from and whom they would send email to (in essence, 
the lhs of the virtual table entry). The server name/password would be 
the name that is associated with the rhs of the virtual table entry.

Since most of the time here, all 3 have the same "name" part, or the 
part before the "@", I never really considered how the 3 might be used 
in other situations, other than the reply address.

This was the way I had planned on using this, but thought that maybe POP 
just might use the virtual table entry. The older linuxconf setup used a 
modified vpop to handle this.

Thanks again,

steve