Use PHP to develop a qmail mail server management system

Email plays an important role in the network. Currently, mail servers running in enterprises use their independent management systems to create accounts, modify passwords, resize mailboxes, and delete mailboxes. When the number of Mailbox users reaches a certain level, the daily maintenance work of the email administrator is extremely heavy, which requires automatic processing of some management tasks (such as account application; at the same time, several group administrators are responsible for some tasks (such as password modification), which frees the email administrator from tedious maintenance work and truly plays a regulatory role on the email server.
Selection of email server and development environment
At present, many email servers do not provide development interfaces. Therefore, the primary problem for developing a mail management system within an enterprise is to find an open mail system that can be combined with a development language.
Because of high stability requirements, large email systems generally use Unix as the server operating system. For example, Hotmail uses FreeBSD and Solaris systems.
Emails provided by Linux have certain defects in the system structure, making it difficult to handle the massive access requests from users. Qmail is a famous free software under GNU. It is a new generation of Unix mail system and supports Maildir storage. It stores each email as a separate file in the user's personal email directory. Qmail supports Virtual domains and Virtual users ). Currently, most popular free email systems in China use qmail as the basic server software and provide multi-level directories to support a large number of users.
From the perspective of development, the development mode of PHP + Linux has been adopted by many developers. Use PHP to call the control program provided by qmail to manage the mail system. To effectively control a large number of users, you can also introduce database management. This article introduces a PHP + Oracle + qmail + Linux development instance.
Overall design
The entire system is divided into two parts: mailbox management and mail sending and receiving. When you apply for an email address, enter necessary information. Then, the system automatically creates the email address and allows you to use it immediately. After a user forgets his or her password, he or she can use the common practice of the Internet to modify the password by answering user-defined questions. For security reasons, after the user answers an error three times, the system locks the account's "fixed email password" function for 30 minutes.
Based on different requirements, mail management classifies user permissions into the following three levels:
◆ Normal users can send and receive emails, modify their email passwords, modify user-defined questions and answers, and query emails in their browsers.
◆ The group administrator can modify the passwords of all accounts in the group and unlock the "fixed mailbox password" function of the Department account.
◆ The Mailbox administrator can modify all mailbox passwords, delete mailboxes, modify mailbox capacity, view Mailbox application information, and unlock the "fixed mailbox password" function of all accounts.