1 Topic by geocheats2

  • geocheats2
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Topic: Why IRedMail uses this kind of config

First of all the fact i can follow a tutorial doesn't mean i am an expert in anything.

I had a disagreement with a colleague of mine about how the e-mail system should work on a Unix(Linux?) system.

He says that the correct way to host such a service is to use the Unix accounts on the system and have each client have his own account where his own mailbox should rest under his home folder.

My question is why did you choose to implement a new service for user management instead of the Unix user management system, is it more secure , more robust , is it somehow more efficient ????

George

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Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: Why IRedMail uses this kind of config

In old days (15 years ago, maybe), many email servers work like what your colleague described, but soon its disadvantages were exploded and people moved to virtual mail user instead. "virtual" here means it's not an Unix system account, but a virtual user stored in SQL/LDAP/..., although it's possible to grant such virtual user ssh login access (with the Linux PAM module), but usually we don't do this.

Comparing to unix system account, virtual mail users have few obvious advantages:

- Easy to handle a lot more mail users. It's SQL/LDAP, you can easily store 1000, 10000, 100000 mail user accounts, each is just one or few SQL rows.
- Easy to manage mail user profiles, no need to touch /etc/passwd.
- Mail users don't have ssh access to server, this is a lot more secure.