Improving mail accounts

[joximu]

Hi killburn
it's getting long... :-)

I don't say that the two functions forward and alias are handled differently by postfix - I only see that there may be a difference in th handling for the customer.
Maybe the difference is more clear if we'd enable the older .forward files - then a mail account owner can forward his mails to other addresses.

If an employee (e@company.com, on ispcp) has his mails forwarded to a foreign account (e@schrottmail.com) but needs to send mails with the company.com account and (because of spf) needs to use the ispcp server - then he'd need a mail address, with password and smtp-auth but without mailspace... :-)
This is maybe not a very usual example - but there are customers who are organized in a very special way...

Virtual mail folders are created by ispcp!
see ispcp-mbox-mngr - sub mbox_add_mta_file_data ...
I wondered since long time why all the forwarding addresses have full maildir folders... - they never get mails inside.

Your example with the forwarded mails to austoresponded mails dows not work (in ispcp you cannot create an autoresponder to forwarded-addresses only). The forwarding mechanism in the arpl-engine is deactivated/not finished since feb 2009 (it was included but now is deactivated). And if you make complex forwardings (e2 -> e1, e1 -> e0, e0 has autoresponder) then the arpl-engine cannot resolve this correctly because of complexibility...

I still see forwardings as a "mail user" related thing, aliases would be a domain-owner/manager thing. So aliases should not be managed by mail users but I (as a mail user only) should be able to configure what I need: forwarding y/n, storage y/n, smtp-auth y/n, password change, autoresponder y/n/change.

Or another point of view on this:
an address is something which belongs to a user - he can decide if he want's fill forwarding (which means redirect?) to one or more addresses (like the .forward mechanism) with or without local copy. etc etc
An alias address is like a second address for an existing account (if my name is often written false, then I'd prefer an alias).

Technically (for postfix-config) the aliases are one sort of the forwards, but they need only an entry in the aliases files - the forwarding configuration need to set different entries (in the aliases, in the virtual, in the transport, the smtp-user-db etc etc)