Skip to main content

Virtual hosted mail

Note: This page is designed for OCF staffers and is a technical description of the service. For information or help using it, see our page about it.

Virtual hosting mail allows groups to receive mail at @group.b.e addresses, and send from those same addresses. It complements our web hosting nicely.

Features​

  • Each user has mail forwarding.

  • Each virtual user can have its own password (not the same as the account password). If a user doesn't have a password set, then they can receive mail but not send it.

  • [[Simple admin panel|vhost_mail]] built into ocfweb for admins to set passwords for emails. It might also be cool if you could change your own password (without having the group password), but that's not currently possible.

Technical implementation​

There is a database on our MySQL host for storing email vhost information. It has one table, addresses, with columns for the incoming address, password, and forwarding addresses (among others).

It has one view, domains, which is generated from the addresses table. This is only used to make the queries Postfix makes simpler. In particular, you never need to update MySQL to add forwarding to a domain; it's entirely based on ~staff/vhost/vhost-mail.conf.

ocflib has simple functions for interacting with this database (see pydoc3 ocflib.vhost.mail).

We use MySQL lookup tables on the mail host to dynamically look up the list of virtual domains (using the domains view), and the addresses (using the addresses table).

For sending, we use pam-mysql to authenticate SMTP sessions before allowing clients to send as a vhost address. (See /etc/pam.d/smtp and /etc/pam-mysql.conf on anthrax).

How do I add mail hosting to a group?​

See here.