Email to database/PHP email engine

Anon

I have a small web hosting business and I was going to write a PHP script to allow my clients to add email accounts on their own.

Because the potential for a large number of email accounts I want to check into a rumour I've heard that you can have a mail server (such as sendmail) port messages to a MySQL database instead of files. Also can they still check mail using their POP3 Outlook Express type program even though it's stored on the database.

If this is true does anyone have any info they can pass on so I can develop this. Or if this is already developed someone can you point me in the right direction

Anon

This can be achieved using Rockliffe MailSite. It is NT based but is by far the most stable server I have ever used. It has won numerous awards.

MailSite can store messages, user info and everything is a database which you can then edit via PHP.

Have a look at www.rockliffe.com

I have used it for mission critical mail servers but it isn't cheap.

Matt B.

Anon

Thanks but I'm developing everything on Unix/Linux servers. 🙂

Jay

Anon

IMHO This is a "bad idea". Email is files, and the best way to store files is on the file system. You'll find that actually storing the messages in MySQL would be very very slow, especially given MySQL's table level locking (I've done it for a mailing list management thing I wrote, with much regret).

What you could do is use something like LDAP to store the login information, and then use the LDAP database for authentication (which your users can add accounts to) while using something like postfix (which can return mailDrop from LDAP) instead of sendmail for the actual delivery. LDAP is very fast for queries, which makes it uniquely suited to this task.

Although I'm prevented from explaining how in detail, we're doing something like this with great success on Solaris (ldap auth is built in on solaris 8, which is now free in most cases). If you're using linux, you may find this useful http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ldap/ldap.html

Best of luck

Anon

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