There are a few questions and things I would like to understand better...
Does your valias mod for QmailAdmin check if enable-valias is set anywhere? I don't see it... you just ALWAYS go through the vpopmail calls instead of direct file access. Right?
Almost always. If VALIAS is undefined in vpopmail (meaning, don't use the database backend to store aliases) then vpopmail uses vpalias.c to manage alias entries in dotqmail files.
I added a "valias_remove()" function to the database backends for removing a single entry from the valias table. I did not write a version of that function for dotqmail files, so qmailadmin relies on it's original code for removing a line from a .qmail file. It shouldn't be difficult to port the code from qmailadmin into vpopmail's vpalias.c to add this functionality.
Secondly, valias_select_all() returns aliases in sorted order when using database backends, but not when using .qmail files. Unfortunately, I didn't come up with an easy way to sort the dotqmail files that didn't result in a possible memory leak (e.g., they would require calling a cleanup function to release allocated memory). This is something that could probably be done, and we would have to make sure that all existing code making use if valias_select_all() called the cleanup function (and it was documented clearly in the API).
Is there any way of getting just the alias names, without the actual forwarding information?
No. It could be handy, and possibly accomplished in the database backends by using "GROUP BY" in the SQL query. It should be easily done in the dotqmail backend.
Does vpopmail maintain the order of alies lines? I think I read somewhere that if you are using database storage it does not. I think that may be a serious problem.
As designed, it does not. I agree that it's a serious problem, and I think it would be easily fixed. Add an auto-incrementing id column and make sure you sort on it.
Am I correct...
With enable-valias forwards and robots are handled by vdelivermail instead of having a .qmail- file in the domain directory and if a database is not used, then .qmail files _are_ used.
Correct.
Mailing lists are not handled by valias.
Correct for two reasons. ezmlm-make manages the files for us, and the order of the entries is important.
I can do anything in a database alias that I can do from a .qmail file alias.
The only thing you lose (currently) is the ordering of the entries. So, it's not possible to have mailing list or other aliases that depend on a certain order to their entries.
-- Tom Collins - [EMAIL PROTECTED] QmailAdmin: http://qmailadmin.sf.net/ Vpopmail: http://vpopmail.sf.net/ Info on the Sniffter handheld Network Tester: http://sniffter.com/
