Mailing List Archive: Separate Username and Domain? (multi-domain email hosting)

Hi,

I have been using dbmail + postfix for a few months now as the mail
server for several domains with a few thousand accounts.

Right now, I'm adding extra fields to dbmail's existing user structure
so I can better accommodate multi-site hosting with ease: such as as an
extra domain field to the users table.

Here is what I have in mind:

Current: userid field contains the full username+domain. (for a
multi-domain dbmail setup)

New: userid field only contains the username part, without domain and
introduce a new domainid (int) filed tied to a new domain table.

1) When an account is created by the cli, it first check to see if the
domain exist, and if not create one, use the domainid returned to
insert the new user.

2) Instead of single queries to seek/validate users, a simple join is
used.

We already have to do this to better manage accounts in a multi-domain
settings and seeing that dbmail 2 is geared toward much larger setups
(with chances of multidomain email hosting increasing), perhaps it's a
good time to make the db layer separate the relationship between a
username and the domain that the username falls under? This change
would increase the complexity of small setups but for large setups is a
great time saver.

What do you guys think? Good or Bad, or just Ugly?

Xing

Yay! - Someone else in my position!

Yes - we definitely should support multi-domain customers, or from my
perspective -- duplicate usernames. Dbmail should only care about the
user_idnr, so that it's up to dbmail-smtp, dbmail-pop3d and dbmail-imapd to
resolve the supplied "arguments" (including say 'ip customer connecting to')
to a particular user_idnr.

Having a look through the auth/authsql.c code -- it looks like a bit too
much of the code is still geared around referring to the username rather
than the user_idnr. This will affect viability of both our needs. I could be
wrong as I've only had a brief glance -- but the resolution of delivery
email address seems to match against usernanes. (b@b.com -> "usernamea"
rather than "3352").

If this could be matched instead against a user_idnr, then the possibility
of having two "mark" usernames with different "domains" or whatever other
secondary key you came up with would work.

I personally would love to see this happen.

What would be the possibility of getting this implemented, guys?

/Mark

> New: userid field only contains the username part, without
> domain and
> introduce a new domainid (int) filed tied to a new domain table.
>
> 1) When an account is created by the cli, it first check to
> see if the
> domain exist, and if not create one, use the domainid returned to
> insert the new user.
>
> 2) Instead of single queries to seek/validate users, a simple join is
> used.
>
> We already have to do this to better manage accounts in a
> multi-domain
> settings and seeing that dbmail 2 is geared toward much larger setups
> (with chances of multidomain email hosting increasing),
> perhaps it's a
> good time to make the db layer separate the relationship between a
> username and the domain that the username falls under? This change
> would increase the complexity of small setups but for large
> setups is a
> great time saver.
>
> What do you guys think? Good or Bad, or just Ugly?