Benjamin Ryzman <zarkdav(_at_)deepthought(_dot_)sv(_dot_)vtcom(_dot_)fr> wrote:
Thus, up to hundreds of thousands of delivery addresses managed by the MTA.
The problem of duplicate mail addresses being solved by the team registrating
the accounts, we're trying to find a way to put mail in the mailboxes :-)
Currently the basic idea is:
- having a mail address consisting of "Surname.Middle-Initials-or-
otherwise-distinguishing-part(_dot_)Name(_at_)provider(_dot_)net"
- take this address, use md5 to generate a shorter fingerprint
(simultaneously giving a greater entropy to the hashing)
- use this fingerprint to generate a system mailbox path for this address
(like first-part-of-md5/second-part-of-md5 or md5 modulo number of predicted
directories)
- write the mail in this mailbox
There is someone who already has implemented a similar scheme (and it
is going to be supported natively by procmail). The hashing algorithm
isn't quite so fancy, though. This method uses something like:
/var/spool/mail/h/e/n/henry
as the mailbox for a user named "henry".
The advantage to this over the MD5 solution is that it can be easily
determined what the location of a particular mailbox is.
--
Sincerely,
srb(_at_)cuci(_dot_)nl
Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).
You are confused; but this is your normal state.