dot allowed adduser/useradd

[Richard Welty]

On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 12:30:51 +0000 WipeOut <wipe_out at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> My reason was to make it possible for a user with the email address 
> "first.last at domain.com", which is out company standard convention for 
> email addresses, to log into their mail box with "first.last".. That way 
> they don't get confused about their email address and user name (as 
> users often do).. These users do not log into the system shell as they 
> are only for mail..

> Is that a good enough reason?

i have done such a setup using exim 4 (an alternative MTA),
courier-imap (an alternative pop3/imap server), with email
account descriptions described in a common PostgreSQL
database. no local accounts needed, postgres describes
everything -- email account names, passwords, locations
of Maildir spools, everything. it's at a client site, the client
even feeds logins and passwords to  their Radius server with
the PostgreSQL database.

it's a little work to set up, but has a lot of nice properties,
and the local user account issue is skirted in its
entirety. i'm sure it's feasible with other modern MTAs
and IMAP servers (i'm pretty sure i could get most of this
functionality with Cyrus instead of Courier, for example.)

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                         rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
    Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security