[olug] Email forwarding - is OLUG better than Google?

[Christopher Cashell]

At Thu, 23 Jan 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Matt Payne, said:
> I'm looking to build an email forwarding service with free
> software....

[Snip: Description of service.]

Very doable.  More information would be good, though.

> Is there a howto for this?   What MTA is best for doing this stuff?
> Will the backend database be LDAP or postgreSQL/mySQL?

Aliasing is a fairly standard and common feature, so I would imagine
that most MTA's would work just fine for it.

As for anything more than that, it really depends.  How many people are
you planning to serve with this?  10?  100?  1000?  1,000,000?

If you don't expect to need this for more than a few hundred people,
then I wouldn't bother with a database or LDAP.  An Internet Relay Chat
Network[1] that I help run provides aliases for all IRC Operators and staff
members simply with a virtual domain setup in QMail and .qmail files
(with a perl script or two to help automate it a little).  Depending on
how many people you plan to serve, that might be more than adequate for
your needs.

If you were to use QMail, you could use the built-in aliasing, which
makes use of a CDB[2] format database, which is very fast for simple
lookups like this.

Personally, if I were doing something like this, I'd prolly not bother
with an SQL database setup unless I was planning on storing more
information than just the alias -> address map.

If you could provide us with a few more details on exactly what you're
doing, and how much you (might) need it to scale, I think we could
provide you with some better suggestions. ;-)

> Matt

  [1]  SorceryNet, http://www.sorcery.net
  [2]  http://cr.yp.to/cdb.html

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| Christopher
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