I've been wandering around the web looking for an answer to my question in vain - yet I'm thinking, someone has got to have done this.

I'm wondering if their is a way of automating the editing of the sendmail virtusertable database so that I can write a script that will manage adding or deleting virtual accounts from the list.

The only info I've been able to find so involves manually editing the virtusertable text file and then hashing the file to create a new virtusertable database. There must be an automated solution! For example, how else would the free email forwarding services that are all over the web work?

Well no matter what you'll have to edit a text file and hash it..... you could write a perl or php script to do that automatically...

From what I've seen, most free email scripts have it setup so that @domain.com goes either directly to a perl/php script, or to a user which then has a .forward file that points to a perl/php script.

No changes are made to the actual virtusers file everytime someone signs up for a new account. It's all managed within the email script.

Josh

Originally posted by Planet Z
From what I've seen, most free email scripts have it setup so that @domain.com goes either directly to a perl/php script, or to a user which then has a .forward file that points to a perl/php script.
[snip]
Josh

OIC - there you go. That makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, I am blinded by ignorance and inexperience when it comes to sendmail. Know of any such out-of-the box GPL licence scripts that do this (preferably PHP or C)?

Another related question which again demonstrates my complete ignorance of how email works is... when sendmail relays or forwards an email, does it mean that the actual email itself is received by the relaying server (thus using up bandwidth to receive the entire message and relay it on to the destination) or is something going on that is more analogous to say Apache sending a redirection header? Does that make sense? :p

Thanks for the replies.