Kartik Vaidyanathan wrote:
Well one major doubt that was prevailing was that do i need to create a system account for each person in order to send/receive mails, and from both (Sven Kirmess & Johannes Berg ) your mails i gather it is a must.
That's not correct. Take a look at http://wiki.dovecot.org/. They have an example with "Virtual user support with OpenLDAP" and "Virtual user support with PostgreSQL". You either use LDAP or a PostgreSQL database to store the mail users. The mail can then be stored in any directory.
The software that i am creating , which is going developed in JSP, will take a new users name and password and create a account for him by executing a shell script in my linux machine.
Should be possible. You have to create the account in SQL or LDAP with that script...
I assume yahoo also does something similar to this to create new mail boxes for any new user.
You use the mailbox for the mailing list archive?
In fact this very mail that i have received from you is because i have subscribed to the dovecott mailing list. How do you think dovecott has been able to accomplish this.
That's done by the mail delivery agent (sendmail, postfix). If you just have to send a mail to each recepient you do not need an IMAP server.
2.Will the mail server support me in anyway by giving me some functionality to add users, thereby creating maildir's (imap) for the users.
No. You have to add the user to the database (LDAP, SQL or /etc/passwd) and create the directory yourself.
3.Dont I need to know the admin login and passwd, to create users?
Yes and no. You need either the root account to create an entry in /etc/passwd or a user which is able to write to SQL or LDAP. Depending on which database you use.
3.Lastly i know this is not that prevalent a question -> I was told mail man does a similar job as to what my software will do. Do you know how mailman works (or even yahoogroups)?.
You probably should ask in as mailman group. They might know better. I will explain how majordomo does this. Majordomo is abother mailing list software (Probably not the best one, but the one I know).
In the /etc/aliases file (which belongs to sendmail, postfix or whatever is your MDA. This files does _not_ belong to dovecot.) there is an entry like this:
dovecot: :include:/usr/local/majordomo/lists/dovecot
Then, the file /usr/local/majordomo/lists/dovecot contains a list of all the persons subscribed to this mailing list. One email address per line. The MDA does send each mail sent to dovecot individually to each entry in the /usr/local/majordomo/lists/dovecot file. The mailing list software does now manage the /usr/local/majordomo/lists/dovecot (adding and removing users). To create a new list, you have to add an entry to /etc/aliases.
Please let me know if the answer does not match to your question. ;-)
Sven