[Exim] Accessing virtual accounts

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Author: Bradford Carpenter
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [Exim] Accessing virtual accounts
Came up with a lot of unix-ignorant questions while considering the
possibilities of exim's virtual domains and piping facilities. Don't
believe it has anything to do with exim specifically, but there are so
many email experts on this list, I was hoping someone could point me in
the right direction. I'm mainly an end user small amounts of local mail.

Basically I have no idea how to create a "virtual" user, ie a user with
no account on the system except for an email account for checking their
email (at their virtual domain, for example). Came across some
tutorials on how to do this with qmail (user must enter their email
address as their username), but doesn't seem applicable to my setup.

Here's the simplest, albeit not terribly practical, example I can think
of. Say I wanted exim to pipe my incoming email to various mboxes
rather than to just my /var/mail/username file. The installed pop3
server (qpopper) will only allow me to check my one incoming mail spool
as I understand it. So how would I set up my system so that my MUA can
check all the mboxes, apart from creating new users for each mail
account in NetInfo; don't really need a shell account for the "virtual"
users, just the abilty to authenticate to the system in order to get
email out of the virtual user's mailbox.

Don't really know how ISP's set up email-only accounts; guess my
question is related to how they do this. Do all users get set up as
shell accounts?

I'm running OS X.3.2 (BSD-based), exim 4.30, and qpopper 4.05.
Everything was compiled with PAM support if this makes a difference.

Can anyone point me to a good tutorial or maybe give a simple
explanation of the steps involved? I looked for a few hours this
afternoon and found nothing that answered this question.

Thanks!
Brad