| 1 | Courier Authentication Library |
| 2 | |
| 3 | Download: [1]http://www.courier-mta.org/download.html#authlib |
| 4 | |
| 5 | Overview |
| 6 | |
| 7 | The Courier authentication library provides authentication services for |
| 8 | other Courier applications. In this context, the term "authentication" |
| 9 | refers to the following functions: |
| 10 | |
| 11 | 1. Take a userid or a loginid, and a password. Determine whether the |
| 12 | loginid and the password are valid. |
| 13 | 2. Given a userid, obtain the following information about the userid: |
| 14 | |
| 15 | A. The account's home directory. |
| 16 | B. The numeric system userid and groupid that owns all files |
| 17 | associated with this account. |
| 18 | C. The location of the account's maildir. |
| 19 | D. Any maildir quota defined for this account. See the Courier |
| 20 | documentation for more information on maildir quotas. |
| 21 | E. Other miscellaneous account-specific options. |
| 22 | |
| 23 | 3. Change the password associated with a loginid. |
| 24 | 4. Obtain a complete list of all login ids. |
| 25 | |
| 26 | The Courier authentication library provides alternative implementations of |
| 27 | these authentication services: |
| 28 | |
| 29 | 1. Use the traditional system password files: /etc/passwd and |
| 30 | /etc/shadow, possibly in conjunction with the PAM library. |
| 31 | 2. Maintain all this information in a GDBM or a DB database. The GDBM or |
| 32 | the DB database is compiled from plain text files. Perl scripts |
| 33 | provide a simple interface for creating and editing the authentication |
| 34 | information, then a script compiles the plain text files into a |
| 35 | database. |
| 36 | 3. Use an LDAP server for authentication. |
| 37 | 4. Use a table in a MySQL database for authentication. |
| 38 | 5. Use a table in a PostgreSQL database for authentication. |
| 39 | 6. Use a table in an SQLite file for authentication. |
| 40 | |
| 41 | All Courier components that use this authentication library, therefore, |
| 42 | will be able to authenticate E-mail accounts using any of the above |
| 43 | methods. |
| 44 | |
| 45 | Additional information can be found in the [2]INSTALL file. |
| 46 | |
| 47 | The authentication API is [3]documented. |
| 48 | |
| 49 | Further resources |
| 50 | |
| 51 | Subscribe to the [4]courier-users mailing list. Go to |
| 52 | http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/courier-users to subscribe |
| 53 | to courier-users, or send a message to |
| 54 | <courier-users-request@lists.sourceforge.net> and put "subscribe" in the |
| 55 | subject line. Search the list archives at |
| 56 | [5]http://markmail.org/browse/net.sourceforge.lists.courier-users. |