Todd A Jacobs:
> I'm not 100% sure I understand the difference in intended usage between
> setting up a ~/alias/.qmail-whatever file and setting up a virtual user in
> /var/qmail/users/assign. As far as I can tell, the former uses forwarding,
> whereas the latter is acting like a true alias.
> Am I understanding this correctly? If so, what are the practical
> implications? They seem almost interchangeable to me.
For the usage you describe, they really do the same thing except that
with the ~/alias/.qmail-whatever mechanism delivery happens twice,
once to the user alias and once to the address in
~/alias/.qmail-whatever. Using assign gives you additional options
though, like running delivery using a specified user/group id in a
directory and with a .qmail-xyz of your choice. This can be quite
handy, I used it for instance to do deliveries for a Cyrus IMAP
Server.
One crucial difference would also be performance on a highly loaded
mailserver with lots of aliases. Delivery using
~/alias/.qmail-whatever requires a scan of the ~/alias/ directory
which can be costly depending on the file system implementation. The
lookup for addresses in /var/qmail/users/assign is done via a hash
table and therefore much faster.
--
Joerg Lenneis
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
