Re: qmail - my experiences with the competition

Philip Hazel writes ("Re: qmail - my experiences with the competition "):
[virtual domains]

> That's sort of vaguely what I though it was. Exim, I believe, can do
> this already, which is why I was puzzled. [...]
>
> I got the impression that what Ian was talking about was something
> slightly different. Can you confirm or deny, Ian?

I wasn't sure that exim could do that, but the other feature I was
talking about was, as you write:
> Let me check that I have understood what you said: the facility is that
> user ph10@???, say, could arrange for mail to
> ph10-special@??? to be handled in some particular way. Is that
> right?

Indeed. The important thing is for the user to be able to get at the
envelope recipient information, which most MTA's don't allow in a
sensible way. Having the MTA be able to bounce addresses with unknown
suffixes is good too, as it preserves the `strict addressing' model
for email address local parts.

One of qmail's good features is the ability to have a virtual domain
owned by a user, so that they have the config files in their directory
and so that any programs executed are executed as them. Can exim do
this ?

...
> I had in fact been wondering about doing that for combining .forward and
> .eximfilter. Given that there now seems to be a possibility of even more
> things, I will think about that some more.

If you arrange for there to be some piece of magic that you can put at
the top of a .forward that makes it into a .eximfilter or an `extra
addresses' alias file or whatever then you only need to stat and/or
read one file.

Ian.