Creating Shell-less E-Mail Accounts?

Ryan asks: "I work for a small ISP (2000 e-mail clients) and my task is to create a Web interface so that we and our affiliates can enter a username, password, and e-mail address(es) along with any other pertinent information for a client and have them be automatically entered into our radius table and MTA/POP server's tables. Sendmail supports LDAP, however there doesn't seem to be a POP server that also supports it. There is EXIM with its native MySQL support, and a patch for qpopper to work with it, but it has the downside of requiring the POP3 username to be username@hostname.com. Has anyone found a better solution for creating e-mail users using SQL databases rather than physical shell accounts? Qmail appears to do all of this, but I'm not sure if it does it exactly how we need it to. Any suggestions?"

Comments

Cyrus a possibility...

[riley]

The Cyrus server from CMU might have the features you are interested in.

In cyrus, there is no requirement for shell account for mailboxes to exist. There is both a POP server and an IMAP server associated with cyrus, but you don't have to run the pieces you don't want. There are patches that allow cyrus to authenticate via LDAP or SQL (a password file and kerberos are supported out of the box).

It scales well. I have it going for 60K users across four machines. The newer versions also have an aggregator that allows you to scale across multiple machines. It interfaces well with both sendmail and qmail (I have not tried postfix yet) and it is pretty easy to manage.

You can check it out at http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/

qmail

[Dionysus]

If you want to check on qmail again, I think it has what you are looking for + it's more secure than sendmail.

using qmail with LDAP database
Using qmail with only one single user account