[Mimedefang] Spam to inactive accounts

[Alberto.daSilva at rmb.co.za]

> Yes, the trick would to extract the active user information into a
> accessdb/virtusertable/aliases format, and I suspect that many people are
> doing just that.  I'm doing that to a limited degree already.  It's just
> that's it's a _manual_ process that must be done on the end mail system
and
> the process differes depending on what type of end mail system is being
> used.

We got around the manual part by using cron to once a day run a
perl script (200 lines) to extract the addressbook from the
backend e-mail system and convert it into accessdb/virtusertable/aliases
format.

> I think that the suggestion was to create a portable and automatic method
on
> the MIMEDefang side to add similar functionality without relying on
sendmail
> or manually generating access / virtual user / alias lists. I'm sure the
> many people already have an acceptable procedure in place for generating
> these files... I don't.  I'm also lazy.  And I also like to program
(small
> programs) :-)  That's why I'm interested in an interface that will do all
of
> the work for me.

I'm not sure how portable you can make it, since there are a number of
backend
e-mail systems - probably the most potable way is to use ldap (which is
already
supported by sendmail)

> That way when a new user is added, I don't make any changes--the first
email
> send to the user will automatically add an entry for that email address.
> Then when that user leaves, cached information about that user will
> automatically expire and then user will automatically be switched from a
> valid to an invalid recipient.  When mail eventually stops going to that
> mailbox, that entry will automatically be deleted.
>
> That seems like a pretty nice framework to me.

Nice idea for activating new users.

I still feel that this can be fully accomplished using sendmail only and
not
duplicate the functionality in MD.

You need a script/tool to extract from backend e-mail to
accessdb/virtusertable/aliases.

Regards,

Alberto