LDAP or ALIASES: Which is more efficient

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

subscribed-lists at sterndata.com wrote:
> I've been asked to look into building an email forwarding system to support
> "branded" email addresses. It's forwarding only. There will be no real
> mailboxes, nor will users have id/passwords on the system.
> 
> So, I'm planning a set level of spam filtering using SpamAssassin and using
> ClamAV and milter-greylist to keep out most of the nastiness.
> 
> I am lucky in that we already have the target email addresses in LDAP. I also
> have the data in a nearby SQL server. I've been reading sendmail docs and some
> O'Reilly books and I'm wondering if LDAP is really the right way to go.  Is it
> more or less efficient that generating a new aliases file every X minutes?
> 
> Which way would you go?

Using LDAP might be way more managable and simpler solution.  Check LDAP 
mail routing part of /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.  It may be perfect 
fit for what you need to do.  You'd simply define a user, assing a set 
of addresses for him/her, and place target address in mailRoutingAddress 
attribute.  And voila, off it goes.  Check that section in README file 
for more cool details.

If you decide to go with files on the disk (and recreate them 
periodicaly with info from LDAP database), my advice is not to use 
aliases file.  Especially not if you need to manage more than one 
domain.  Save yourself some trouble.  Use virtusertables.

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7