How to have user e-mail separated from ftp

[t-mug]

It seems to me: the really hard approach of ISPConfig2.x is to have automatically e-mail users and ftp users merged into this one system user with at least these capabilities:

• send and recieve e-mail (optionally manage the e-mail account: autoresponder, antispam and antvirus settings, define forwarders and aliases)
• up- and download files in predefined zones of a clients web site
• publish content in predefined zones of a clients web site

This is not always what clients or even hosters would prefer. What would you say, if these capabilities could be separated, even in ISPConfig 2.x?



E-mail and FTP in this setup are completly independent from each other. If e-mail is not checked, then there will be no entry for this user in the virtusertable. If FTP is unchecked, it's the same for only this user as FTP were unchecked for the whole web. So all functionality to separate these two was always there - I've only tried to put the ends apart. Very few lines of code were necessary to do this.

But the overall unix system user remains of course. There are still all these hidden config files of procmail, spamassassin and so on left; the structure and permissions of files and folders are not involved in my private solution. To have these files is quite useless - until one decides to grant an e-mailbox to an user or to let him upload and publish. then is all in the right place.

My intention was not to make ISPConfig2 unstable, of course. So the less code I had to touch the happier I was.

Therefore don't ask please for appearently next steps like defining an FTP root folder for an user etc. I think, ISPConfig 3 is the rising star in the background, containing really good stuff and much better and really amazing concepts. So all this stuff belongs there. For me it is almost like to say Good bye to ISPConfig 2.

So try it out and give feedback. PLEASE don't use the attached patches in production environments. If so, do it on your own risk.
Note, that until now there is no feedback from Till or Falko, so it's really dangerous.

[t-mug]

Thanks to Till for planning to provide an FTP option in upcoming ISPConfig releases - see the bugtracker.

Till, additionally it would be great if you could define a field and a database column for "user_email_access" as well - due to my patches above. I personally really need this field and it is used by customers in my installation. You know that doctype handling is not very easy to manage and every official change in the user's doctype def would force me to have a lot of work afterwards. Moreover, my inofficial database doctype columns (like "user_email_access") will get lost on every update and require additional work. Otherwise I can understand that especially this field can be irritating as a general offer on the user tab because it maybe does not suit quite well to the concept of the ISPConfig2 user (e.g. the required localpart field does not depend on the email checkbox field, what makes no sense of course).

So this field could be hidden by default (as some other fields always are inside the doctype def) and it's appearance could ideally be controlled by a directive in the general config file. If you like, I would provide a patch for this.

This way the "Enable E-Mail" feature can be optionally activated by ISP's and - last but not least - provide a way (even if deactivated by default) to have FTP-only users. This also makes sense if you think about the remoting framework, where an UI is possibly less irritating by separation of email and ftp users.