[Workaround] Preparing the Etch tutorial

Christoph Haas email at christoph-haas.de
Wed Apr 18 15:42:50 CEST 2007


Dear list,

Etch is out and enough people have bogged me about the new ispmail
tutorial so I think that things need to get started. :)

I have already received emails on how to migrate to Etch cleanly, about
pitfalls and what's different. In addition I have some own ideas. So if
there is anyone out there who likes to co-write the tutorial you are
invited. Some information about what is intended in the new tutorial:

- The tutorial will be written in ReST. Formerly the tutorial was
  written in DocBook/XML which isn't very easy on the eyes. If you are
  familiar with wiki syntax or asciidoc you will feel right at home.
- We need a web interface to maintain the accounts and aliases.
  Tomasz Miklas has already offered to write a Perl script for that.
- The database schema so far was kept close to how the mappings for
  Postfix look. But it's not very nifty. Imagine what happens if you
  need to rename a domain. You will have to rename all aliases and
  virtual users and the domain entry. I'm dreaming of a _normalized_
  database where we throw around primary keys instead of strings.
  A migration script from the former Sarge schema to the normalized
  form is currently being developed.
- Related to database normalization: Postfix doesn't care if the
  database is normalized - it expects the virtual_mailbox_domains,
  virtual_alias_maps and virtual_mailbox_maps in the usual format.
  MySQL doesn't offer much in this field to make things easier.
  But PostgreSQL has a notion of "views". Those save SQL queries
  to give you a query result from the database in a certain format.
  So we had to define the view once and can happily use it in
  Postfix/SASL and Courier. Anyone opposed to PostgreSQL?
- Courier authentication is now done by the "courier-authlib" package.
  We need to find out how to use that well.
- A lot of users have complained that the passwords have been stored
  in plain text. We will have to encrypt passwords.
- We should find a proper MDA (mail delivery agent) for virtual
  mailboxes. It's nice to have spam mail automatically delivered
  to a user's spam folder. Yadda or maildrop come to mind. Any
  experiences with that?

I'm open to further ideas or comments on the tutorial. If there are
(serious!) translators or co-authors out there just let me know on this
list.

 Christoph




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