[vchkpw] vpopmail management with php
Hello, I am new to the list. The last weeks I tried to research on php based vpopmail manager. The nearest I found were some vpopmail php extensions in PECL that are v. 0.2 (beta). We have a web publishing software in php/Smarty/PostgreSQL and we run qmail/vpopmail/ezmil. What we are looking for is vpopmail management possibility form within php. We need to build a three level system - 1) where server administrators can give max. number e-mail accounts per domain (this can be enforced with the db) 2) where the domain administrators can create e-mail accounts and 3) where the account users can manage their accounts (password, auto-responder). Later we will extend that to cover ezmlm. As we did not find anything like that so far - I would like to ask if anybody knows anything similar. If not - we would like to write it ourselves and if anybody is interested in similar functionality - we could specify/write it together. It can be open source. Best, Iavor -- CEE Solutions Ltd. is the brand behind very small technologies and very small media www.verysmall.org
RE: [vchkpw] vpopmail management with php
Rick, Thanks. I replied off list. By the way - I do not know if I have problem with my Outlook or the list is configured that way - but both 'Reply' and 'Reply to All' result with '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' in the To: field all other fields - empty. Iavor -Original Message- From: Rick Widmer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 10:55 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [vchkpw] vpopmail management with php If you are thinking of doing this, you might want to look at the updated vpopmail extension I have here: http://kimberly.developersdesk.com/ It has quite a few new functions, and allows most of QmailAdmin's functionality, if you are willing to configure your web server to run as the vpopmail user. If you want to look at what I've done with pMailAdmin, let me know off list, and I'll send you a copy. Rick Widmer Iavor Raytchev wrote: > Hello, > > I am new to the list. > > The last weeks I tried to research on php based vpopmail manager. The nearest I found were some vpopmail php extensions in PECL that are v. 0.2 (beta). > > We have a web publishing software in php/Smarty/PostgreSQL and we run qmail/vpopmail/ezmil. What we are looking for is vpopmail management possibility form within php. We need to build a three level system - 1) where server administrators can give max. number e-mail accounts per domain (this can be enforced with the db) 2) where the domain administrators can create e-mail accounts and 3) where the account users can manage their accounts (password, auto-responder). Later we will extend that to cover ezmlm. > > As we did not find anything like that so far - I would like to ask if anybody knows anything similar. If not - we would like to write it ourselves and if anybody is interested in similar functionality - we could specify/write it together. > > It can be open source. > > Best, > > Iavor > > -- > CEE Solutions Ltd. is the brand behind very small technologies and very small media > > www.verysmall.org > > > >
[vchkpw] php extension or daemon
Hello, I posted here a couple of days ago a note about the php vpopmail extension and I got in touch with Rick Widmer who has done some progress on it. As I wrote then - we want to write high level php/Smarty GUI for vpopmail management module. The main stumbling block seems the need to run Apache as vpopmail user. I have not investigated deep enough, but this seems to be one of the main reasons why the extension is somehow dead. In our company we had a discussion on the issue and the prevailing opinion is that we should not waste time with the extension, but write a daemon. This weekend we will experiment with that. Today, searching more in depth on the issue - I found some postings on this list by people who are in favour of daemon. If anybody is interested in the issue - I would be glad to discuss it. We started a small 'unofficial' wiki to try to coordinate the effort - www.verysmall.org/vpopmail - there we have published details about the php/Smarty vpopmail manager we plan to write. Looking forwards for some feedback. Best, Iavor
[vchkpw] php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story
Hello everybody, Sorry for cross posting if you get this message two or three times. This is a milestone message and I will not make it a practice. First, thank you everybody who wrote back (all in the CC:). Your comments were great and lead to much better visibility in the situation php <> vpopmail. In this e-mail I make a summary of the situation and propose a direction. Summary --- Our original goal was to write a php/Smarty/PostgreSQL (the db type is optional) open source mail management module that can allow small (or bigger) dedicated servers to offer mail (qmail/vpopmail/ezmlm) services including billing with super user/domain administrator/mail account owner interfaces that can be used as stand alone or integrated easily in other applications. It is mean to fill in the gap in this technology niche (php/Smarty). qmailadmin does a good job, but does not give tools to the php community - especially to be built into other systems or expanded. More about the project here - http://sourceforge.net/projects/vs-mail-manager/ (the project is very young) However, we hit a bottleneck. The bottleneck -- After we researched into the matter we found the bottleneck - the php <> vpopmail communication. The current php vpopmail extension is half dead for a number of reasons, one of the mail - the security issues - Apache must run as the vpopmail user in order for this to work. Looking for solution As we do not produce 'private' solutions - we tried to spark a community process on the matter. We talked to more than 20 people and on the two main lists - vpopmail and PECL. We talked to the current php vpopmail extension maintainer James Cox, to one of the original authors Boian Bonev and to one of the current active developers Rick Widmer. We have not escalated the issue to the vpopmail and php maintainers so far. May be this should happen at some point. Our goal is to try to produce a simple and easy to use community supported solution. So far the conclusion is that the interest in the vpopmail extension is far from encouraging. It is used here and there - but all people who use it acknowledge that this is a 'strange' thing. So the answer seems not to be there. Broad series of brainstorming lead to the idea that the solution might be rather in direction of a daemon rather than php extension. This idea was supported by more than ten people from all those who replied. I had a chat with Boian Bonev (one of the original authors of the php vpopmail extension) and he also supports the daemon idea - but he added that it is important to be decided where the daemon will live - in vpopmail, in php or elsewhere (alone). So this is the idea we want to explore now - "php <> vpopmail -> daemon or?" First code -- Rick Macdougall has written a daemon for somebody and this somebody has agreed to open the source. This might be a starting point. Waiting from Rick to write back with details. Invitation -- In order to avoid fragmented communication I would like to invite everybody interested to join the list vs-mail-manager-daemon on the http://sourceforge.net/projects/vs-mail-manager/ page - we will use this list for temporary initial discussion until we see if there is future in the daemon project. There we can also discuss extension or daemon or triggering (as Marcin Soltysiak suggested) ... After the initial stage we might kill the daemon project or wrap it up and freeze it or develop it - the stage is open. At the end we need clear and simple solution that can be easy to use by the php community. Please, feel free to forward this communication to anybody you think will be interested in the matter. Notice -- I guess I do not need to say it - but I'll say it - we are not forking anything neither trying to split the development of any project. We try to isolate the case in a neutral environment (as it is a cross-project one), solve the conceptual and community problems and see where is its home. Looking forwards to see you there. Please, note that the list was just created so it might take some hours before it is activated. In order not to miss some of you - I will wait with the first posting about 24 hours. Best, Iavor -- CEE Solutions Ltd. is the brand behind very small technologies and very small media www.verysmall.org
RE: [vchkpw] php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story
Hello everybody, As it seems that the daemon idea prevails - what about a 'home' for the daemon? When I spoke to Boian Bonev (one of the authors of the php vpopmail extension) he was absolutely for the daemon idea, but he said that it is very important to decide about its home - Is it going to be somewhere around vpopmail or somewhere around php or somewhere around itself. In certain way it somehow belongs to all these places. As in addition to a home - it will need also a group of people who believe in it - the place where it lives should be easily accessible. Would be best to open a Sourceforge.net project and open a wiki for an easy white board? Iavor
RE: [vchkpw] php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story
[snip] Ken Jones wrote: That sounds good. Of course as a C programmer I'd prefer it be written in C linking in the vpopmail API. I'd like to take a swing at building it in C over the weekend. vmailmgr has something like this already, including a php module to talk to it. Perhaps we can re-use some of that code. [snip] I would also vote for that approach. However we should not forget that this is a php gate into vpopmail and it should be 'as easy as php' to use - otherwise it will not get popularity.
RE: [vchkpw] php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story
[snip] X-Istence wrote: Now what i want to ask is, could we write it efficiently. As i would want to deploy this over multiple servers, and having everything written out in normal ASCII would be a waste of bandwidth (all bytes count), i think that we should make it binary communication, just like DJB is trying to do with IM2000. [snip] We must write it efficiently and with all (as many as possible) aspects in mind. If we create the next thing that 'works, but...' - it would be not very useful.
RE: [vchkpw] php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story
[snip] Marcin Soltysiak: > Ken: > > That sounds good. Of course as a C programmer I'd prefer it be > written in C linking in the vpopmail API. I'd like to take a swing > at building it in C over the weekend. vmailmgr has something > like this already, including a php module to talk to it. Perhaps > we can re-use some of that code. That woudl be the best way. However, then we'd need a PHP API to use in web-apps [snip] Ken, actually how do you imagine php to talk to the daemon?
RE: [vchkpw] php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story
[snip] X-Istence: why? We could talk to it using normal sockets. I dont see why it would require a special API to talk to a normal deamon on a TCP/IP. Even Unix sockets. [snip] I heard this idea several times and I think I like it.
[vchkpw] how will php talk to the daemon (was: php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story)
[snip] Ken Jones: On Friday 02 April 2004 2:15 pm, Marcin Soltysiak wrote: > That woudl be the best way. However, then we'd need a PHP API to use in > web-apps Yep, a php module api to talk to the daemon. Apparently that is what the vmailmgr daemon has. [snip] So you did not mean sockets... hm... It seems now the next bottleneck is 'how will php talk to the daemon'.
RE: [vchkpw] php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story
[snip] Ken Jones On Friday 02 April 2004 2:32 pm, Iavor Raytchev wrote: > Would be best to open a Sourceforge.net project and open a wiki for an easy > white board? I'd like to keep it in the vpopmail project. The daemon could be part of the regular code and the php client module could be part of contrib? I really like the idea of a wiki, too bad we don't have one for vpopmail. [snip] OK - in the vpopmail project it seems best to me. Only you have to promise to be serious about it :) A wiki - we can use this one - http://www.verysmall.org/vpopmail/ - I did it for the project. If you have better idea - we can move it under another sub-folder/domain. We host for example www.pgaccess.org (that had similar revival about 2-3 years ago). I am going to move my staff (the very small mail manager) form there to another location.
RE: [vchkpw] php vpopmail daemon etc. - developing story
[snip] Rick Macdougall: Ken Jones wrote: > I'd like to keep it in the vpopmail project. The daemon could be part of > the regular code and the php client module could be part of contrib? > I really like the idea of a wiki, too bad we don't have one for vpopmail. Hi, My only problem with that solution is that I wouldn't want to see the daemon and related php client so closely tied to vpopmail that releases have to be based on releases of vpopmail itself. I think if it does stay in the vpopmail area of sourceforge (or else where) that it should be it's own separate downloadable package and not something that you have to download vpopmail to get. [snip] Yes, that's what I mean when I told Ken that they must be very serious about it. We had similar siutaiton when we revived pgaccess (www.pgaccess.org) 3 years ago (a Tcl/Tk GUI for PostgreSQL). The PostgreSQL team wanted it closer and we wanted it not so close. At the end they must focus on PostgreSQL and we - on pgaccess. If the main project gets into a difficult time (change of maintainers, etc.) - and if the sub-project is too close - it can suffer. At the end - the spirit of qmail is modularity - why shouldn't we continue it? I am not against - I just think we should be aware of the dangers of the thing getting stuck and killing a lot of investment in infrastructure and code that uses it.
RE: [vchkpw] proposed vpopmaild commands/usage
Guys, I am in hospital at the moment - one of the muscles of my left leg refused to work and the doctors look for the reason. I could not read all posts - I would just like to tell you that two more people are interested in this daemon - and they want to write it - so it seems that this project has the unique chance to be something supported by a broad community of top people. I have never managed such huge community effort, so I have no idea about the dynamics. I only hope that personal pursuits will not allow any of the great people interested in the daemon to be lost. I'll try to come back to the list on Monday. Until then - best to all, Iavor
RE: [vchkpw] vpopmaild development
[snip] Tom: At the very least, vpopmaild discussion should be on vpopmail-devel instead of the vchkpw list. I am sure that there are others, like me, who aren't interested in following the early stages of development and would prefer not to receive 20-30 messages a day discussing it. [snip] May be I am catching up a bit too late. Did the vpopmaild discussion move somewhere? I would support this for another reason. The vpopmail daemon is quite important - may be for some it is just a vpopmail 'feature' of vpopmail as for others it is a door to a whole universe.
