Email Alias Help Needed...

[Anon]

Does anyone have any solutions/thoughts on how to create a PHP-based email forwarding system in a Linux environment?

I want to create a system that allows users to create and administer a free email forward for a dedicated domain. Ideally it is scalable and has admin capabilities.

Thanks for any information!

Blake

[trippyd]

Actually, I have been working on just this thing. The easiest way I found that was secure (not changing the permissions of the aliases file) was to have a cron job run by the root every 30 minutes that updated the aliases file. I am using a virtual email domain for this project, but this could work with the standard system aliases as well. Like so:

Cron job:

15,45 /usr/bin/mysql -B -N -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASENAME < /root/vemail.sql > /etc/vmail/aliases.somedomain.com

contents of vemail.sql:
select concat(user_name, ":"), email from usertable;

To do it with the system aliases, you would have to add a newaliases command to the cronjob, I would write a script for it, say it is called "updateEmail":

Cron Job:
15,45 /root/updateEmail

contents of updateEmail:
/usr/bin/mysql -B -N -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASENAME < /root/vemail.sql > /etc/vmail/aliases.somedomain.com;
newaliases;

Hope this helps!

D

[trippyd]

actually, it should be:

contents of updateEmail:
/usr/bin/mysql -B -N -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASENAME < /root/vemail.sql > /etc/aliases;
newaliases;

sorry.

D