[Samba] Postfix and Samba best practice
Kevin Bailey
kbailey at freewayprojects.com
Sun Mar 15 15:39:09 GMT 2009
Hi,
We have a server which is going to be a Samba file server and a Postfix
server where the users will access their mail over IMAP.
We normally prefer to use Maildir storage as it seems to be recommended
over mailbox - for me, for example, I am subscribed to a dozen or so
lists and have tens if not hundreds of thousands of emails on the
server. The combination of Postfix and Courier-imap has worked
perfectly for a couple of years.
So - in /etc/postfix/main.cf we set
mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail -a "$EXTENSION"
DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/ MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
to put the mail under my home directory and to enable procmail to work.
(I can then use procmail to sort mail into subdirectories etc).
Now, if I set up Samba as default on Debian it shares out my home
directory to Windows clients. If I allow the viewing of hidden files
then the .Maildir directory shows up on Windows where it can be explored
or even deleted.
In my case it's not a problem because I won't (intentionally) delete
that folder - but we're setting up a server for a client with normal users.
So, we want to separate the Maildir from the directory being shared out
over Samba.
My question is this:
Is it better to store the mail somewhere else entirely - i.e.
/var/mail/users or something or a new home directory (/home/mailstorage)
or something? In which case how best to set up permissions? It seems
that when the mail is stored it gets the username as the owner:group.
This should mean that logging in over imap should allow that user to
read/manipulate mail.
Or should I try to share out a different directory via Samba. I.e.
Leave the mail in /home/username/.Maildir and get Samba to share out
/home/username/samba for example?
Obviously, I can bodge this around with permissions etc but would prefer
any links to best practice so that we can implement the best way on all
future installs.
BTW - I've (sorry!) cross posted this to the Samba/Postfix list to see
what both sides say - hope that's OK.
Regards,
Kevin
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