Re: [Exim] Washington mbx again

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Author: Chris Snell
Date:  
To: Paul Robinson, exim-users
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Washington mbx again
At 01:25 PM 10/2/2000, Paul Robinson wrote:

>Just out of curiosity, does anybody know of a POP3 daemon that has the
>functionality of the mysql-exim-qpopper patch, but uses a maildir-friendly
>pop3 daemon instead? Let me guess - this is another one I'll be writing
>myself from scratch then... I love spending my evenings with a pile of RFC
>print-outs, don't you? :-)


[slightly off-topic]

I have a hacked-up version of cucipop (Cubic Circle POP3 daemon) that
supports BSD & SysV-style mailboxes. It authenticates to a MySQL
server. It incorporates some patches from Jonathan Gilpin (@ xpedio.com)
as well as some modifications by me. I chose a somewhat non-standard way
to handle my mailboxes:

Exim and my POP3 server run on high ports and I'm using my firewall
software (ip-filter) to map them to ports 25 and 110 respectively. They
both run as a non-root user and the entire mailspool is owned by that user,
including all user's mail files. None of my users have real UNIX accounts;
they all have "virtual" accounts that exist only in a MySQL table.

The idea behind my setup is decent but there are still several major problems:

1) cucipop's file locking (and lock checking) is completely broken. I've
had a couple incidents of mailbox corruption because of this.

2) The idea of "virtual" mail accounts (ie users with no real UID) may not
be as secure as it sounds. I'm interested in hearing some opinions from
people who know more about UNIX security than I.

3) cucipop's code, in general, is a spaghetti mess. It may make perfect
sense to the author (and it certainly runs fast) but its very difficult to
debug.

I think there is a real need for another freely-available POP3 server that
satisfies the following needs:

- fast
- standalone (ie not spawned from inetd)
- MySQL (or Oracle, DBM, ODBC, /etc/passwd, PAM, etc) authentication
- support for different mailbox formats and mailbox hierarchies 
(ie     /var/mail/s/snell, etc)
- secure


I've talked to several folks who are interested in writing something like
this. Anyone else interested?

-chris
--
Chris Snell <chris@???>               210.828.5558 W
Systems & Networks Architect                    210.602.2308 M
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