[ postfixadmin-Bugs-2661366 ] add parameter to disable alias magic

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Bugs item #2661366, was opened at 2009-03-04 15:12
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by olfway
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Category: None
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 4
Private: No
Submitted By: Pavel Volkovitskiy (olfway)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: add parameter to disable alias magic

Initial Comment:
not everyone needs to have alias for every mailbox, so there should be a way to disable automagically alias creating


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>Comment By: Pavel Volkovitskiy (olfway)
Date: 2009-04-10 16:59

Message:
any chances of getting rid of such aliases after 2.3 release?

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Comment By: Charles (libertytrek)
Date: 2009-04-10 16:03

Message:
Hopefully we can all agree that, since this will add more complexity, it
should most *definitely* *not* be added until after 2.3 is released...

:)

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Comment By: GingerDog (gingerdog)
Date: 2009-04-10 11:20

Message:
I'm not (yet) in favour of this - my money is on leaving it as it is.

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Comment By: Pavel Volkovitskiy (olfway)
Date: 2009-04-10 02:10

Message:
select username from mailbox where domain = 'domain.tld' union select
address from alias where domain = 'domain.tld';

that's tricky?

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Comment By: Pavel Volkovitskiy (olfway)
Date: 2009-04-10 02:01

Message:
you can use sql 'union' to merge selects from mailbox and alias table
select a from t1 union select a from t2 (can be wrong in details, but it's
easy and not tricky at all)

one simple selects union vs magic "if removing alias, also removing
mailbox, real_alias, force_delete" - union clearly wins imho

real word problem:
i had to restore mailbox once, after i removed alias and postfixadmin
removes mailbox just in case

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Comment By: Christian Boltz (christian_boltz)
Date: 2009-04-10 01:52

Message:
IIRC, Postfix first checks the alias maps and, if it doesn't find a match,
the mailbox maps. This means that you'll never reach a mailbox if your
domain has a catchall address. There might be some very tricky SQL query to
solve this, but having an alias for every mailbox is the easiest (and easy
to understand) solution.

Yes, if you delete a mailbox or mailbox alias, postfixadmin removes both
the mailbox and its alias. (This is basically a feature because the alias
would loop to itsself without the mailbox.)

Yes, these aliases add some complexity to the code - but they allow to
have a much simpler SQL query in postfix. So it's worth it IMHO.

Having an option to disable these aliases would add more complexity ("if
$maintain_magic_aliases then run_existing_code"), and until now I'm not
sure if there is any benefit. 
My question remains - did you hit any real-world problem with this?

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Comment By: Pavel Volkovitskiy (olfway)
Date: 2009-04-10 01:10

Message:
catchall alias can be configured without such alias-for-every-mailbox
scheme, at least it works with exim here and i'm sure it can be configured
with postfix too

magic is bad, with one of previous snapshot it removes mailbox then i
removed alias for it
also you have to remember about that if you doing some sql updates,
especially if they hidden in web gui
i think that these aliases just adds unneeded complexity to code by itself
(looks in delete.php, for ex delete_alias)
it seems it will remove fo...@do... alias if i remove fo...@do...
mailbox?


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Comment By: Christian Boltz (christian_boltz)
Date: 2009-04-10 00:26

Message:
I know that the aliases for every mailbox is not always needed (but you'll
need it if you use a catchall alias). OTOH, I'm not aware that it hurts in
any situation. The worst thing I'm aware of are some wasted bytes in the
alias table ;-)

What is the reason for your request? Is there a usecase where the mailbox
aliases cause any problems?

If these aliases don't cause real-world problems, I'm not in favour of
allowing to disable them. There might be some side effects (maybe in
postfixadmin, maybe in the postfix configuration) and it adds some unneeded
complexity to the code.

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