Chapter 15. The Users Database

In Chapter 10, we saw that local deliveries all look up the mailbox in qmail's users database to determine both where to deliver a message, and what user and group ID and home directory to use when making the delivery. Although the most common setup of users is to deliver to the users in /etc/passwd, the users database is considerably more flexible than a mere mirror of the password file.

The users database maps each local address to a set of user data including:

  • Username

  • Numeric user ID

  • Numeric group ID

  • Home directory

  • Character to separate parts of a subaddress, usually a dash

  • Extension, used to find an appropriate qmail file

The qmail-lspawn program changes to the user and group ID and home directory before starting a delivery, then uses the separator character and extension to locate a .qmail file to control the delivery, as covered in Chapter 10.



qmail
qmail
ISBN: 1565926285
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 152

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