On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Steve Platt wrote:
> We have (historically always had) aliases for each of our users a bit like
> this :-
>
> full.name: username
> username: username@mailhost
I've been thinking some more about this case. It seems to me that there
are two ways in which aliases are used:
(1) As a way of making several local parts "synonymous" (as above);
(2) As mini mailing lists.
In case (1), when an address is being verified (e.g. during the arrival
of an SMTP message) you probably want to carry on checking the child
address, so that you get the same effect whichever of the synonyms you
verify. This especially applies in cases like this:
full.name: username
username: :fail: gone away, don't know where
However, in case (2) you probably don't want to check out all
the members of the list - the existence of the list itself is good
enough for verification.
At the moment, Exim always takes the (2) approach - I guess lists were
in my mind when I implemented it. It now seems to me that when an alias
generates just one child address, this is a special case. I propose,
therefore, to make a change like this:
If aliasfile generates just one address, verification doesn't stop,
but goes on to verify the new address, and this continues for as long
as single children are generated.
I propose NOT to do this for forward files, because I think they are
fundamentally different. Either they are personal files (which you
aren't really interested in when verifying a local user - indeed, the
default configuration has no_verify set) or they are mailing lists.
Views?
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
