On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 01:33:35PM +0000, Michele Carandente wrote:
> I'm making a GUI to configure in an easy way my mailserver.
snip
> Do you agree?
>
> Sorry for my questions, but I'm not a big expert of postfix and
> I'm trying to understand a bit better his behaviour...
My thought is that to make a useful administrative GUI, you would
need to be a Postfix expert. And if you were, what advantage does
this GUI give you? Not much that I can see.
Typically the goal of a GUI is to put highly technical matters in the
hands of non-technical people. For email admin, I think that is a
terribly bad idea.
If someone qualified disagreed, and decided to work on making a GUI,
IMO the best possible model for it would be SWAT, the Samba Web
Administration Tool. In fact SWAT itself could probably be adapted
fairly easily.
SWAT is not a "point-and-drool" GUI. The administrator has to know
the subject, and the GUI does little to shield him/her from the
details. In fact, the best part of it is the integrated hyperlinking
to the HTML documentation.
Note, Postfix already boasts extensive HTML documentation. The hard
part is already done.
A GUI might have a handful of basic templates corresponding to
various typical roles that a mail server might need to fulfill.
But all that said, back to the question of why? Who is this going to
benefit, how? Look at "postfixadmin". That's the kind of thing which
can be put in the hands of a non-technical person, because it is not
at all what the name implies. It's a Mysql frontend for management of
IMAP user maps. You set up Postfix to work with it, then basically
leave Postfix alone.
--
Offlist mail to this address is discarded unless
"/dev/rob0" or "not-spam" is in Subject: header
