[Exim] OT: Virtual domains implementation (general understan…

Hi to all of you,

I'm struggling for three days now with one problem.
As I do not exactly know where I can get help, I'm trying it on the exim list as I know of excellent people here who like to help and have best knowledge.
So maybe someone can help me with this problem.

A second reason why I am asking the question totally off-topic here is that I believe the vmailmgr list isn't much frequented and I hope someone on this list knows something on how to help me. ;-) (the courier-imap list isn't very congenial to me as well ;-) )

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I'm trying to set up a virtual domains configuration.
Local domains are working (using only the newest versions of exim, exiscan and spamassassin).
Virtual domains are working too as far I can see.
The issue is that I want to be able to download mails from a client.
TO get exim deliver into the directories of the virtual domains folder is not a problem.
I'm delivering the mails to 2 places, one is the standard location (/var/spool/vdoms/$domain/$local_part) and with a shadow_transport I do maildir delivery to /home/vdomuser/$domain/$local_part/Maildir .
This works great, no problem to exim. (Exim is a great MTA, I think one of the best, world-leading *grin*)

I have a big understanding problem how I can get the mails to a client.
Running Courier-IMAP as IMAP and POP3 service, both standard and SSL'ed, the courier-daemons are looking (AFAIK) for standard-directories such as /home/$system-user/Maildir.
But in a virtual domain environment it's normal not to have one system-user per domain.
So how can I achieve this at all?
Since three days now I'm googl'ing, alltheweb'ing and such stuff, always get the same bad results and have absolutely no fortune at all getting this stuff to work.

I think, as far as I figured out till now, you need something like a mapper to map a virtual user db file with username & passwd's & mail-directories in it to the courier-daemons.
As far as I now know there is vmailmgr and vpopmail out there.
Are they doing this job??
I tried to compile vmailmgr because I think I personally like the concept of one system-user per domain, as I only have a couple of domains so far. But vmailmgr won't compile at all. In no version, not as source, not as src-rpm.
In the rpm there is no tool like authvmailmgr which I think I have to implement in courier-imap.
In the source I think I saw this module (authvmailmgr) but as the source absolutely does not compile on my station (SuSE 9.0 Pro on Pentium I 200, 64MB), I think vmailmgr is kicked out right now. :-(

Now I gave vpopmail a closer look and found out, as far as I read and could understand, that for virtual user's there must be all data in a mysql database which I absolutely don't want to use for approximately 5 domains... This would be a little overdrive I think ;-)


So how are you handling this problem?
What did I get wrong at all?
What have I got to use to make my wishes work?


Thanks so far for reading, in hope that someone can help me out of my situation, even if this is OT.

Michael