Administrative Hinweise, Hinweise zu Qmail, Hinweise zu POP3

QMAIL-POPLOGIN

NAME

qmail-poplogin -- checkpassword plugin for POP3 using separate passwords

SYNOPSIS

   /var/qmail/bin/qmail-popup \
      `cat /var/qmail/control/me` \
      /var/qmail/bin/qmail-poplogin \
      /var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d

DESCRIPTION

qmail-poplogin is a checkpassword-compatible plugin that may be used in the context of qmail-popup and qmail-pop3d. Unlike checkpassword, however, qmail-poplogin does not use the usual password for authorization but a user-configurable password in ~/.poppasswd. This avoids the security threat of passing passwords in the clear that would also permit an unrestricted login.

That means if no ~/.poppasswd exists for a particular user, qmail-poplogin denies any access. ~/.poppasswd files have a format similar to that of passwd that consists of three colon-separated fields per line: mailbox name, encrypted passwd, and mail directory. Mailbox names consist of the login name and are optionally followed by a dash and a second name component. Example:

   borchert:S903JHAaJYtlY:./mailbox/inbox/
   borchert-bugtraq:S903JHAaJYtlY:./mailbox/bugtraq/
   borchert-politech:S903JHAaJYtlY:./mailbox/politech/

This creates three POP users named ``borchert', ``borchert-bugtraq', and ``borchert-politech' together with their invidual passwords and their associated mail directory.

In case of a successful authorization, qmail-poplogin passes the third field of the matching entry in ~/.poppasswd to its command parameter (usually qmail-pop3d).

DIAGNOSTICS

qmail-poplogin returns in conformance to checkpassword following exit codes:

     0 in case of success
     1 in case of hard errors
   111 in case of temporary problems

Additionally, an auth.info log entry is passed to syslog.

An alerting email message to root is generated on tries to login to accounts with a user id less than 100, or on passing the password of the system's passwd table.

FILES

   ~/.poppasswd        pop access configuration file

AUTHOR

Andreas Borchert, borchert@mathematik.uni-ulm.de

converted to HTML: 2000/10/21