Pure Virtual mail users in VMpro?

Not sure if this is the right place for this but here goes with my investigation into whether VMpro options can do what I want. Just trying to clear my head as to the best approach for a new server config...

Been using VM Pro for years using Postfix/dovcot/Sasl/Squirrelmail using the standard Postfix setup maps that come in a VM install. Great. Now...with a new pre-production server...

...I am hoping to do biz selling many more email a/c's to a wider audience and don't want all the users to to be Unix users BUT also want to carry on letting the existing users who are unix users carry on. Also the domain names used for the email will not need apache websites.

Just clean simple IMAP, also with the option of users using squirrelmail for web access.

OPTION IVE LOOKED AT Using many of the Howtos out there for...Postfix, Dovecot, mySQL, sasl, PostfixAdmin... I tried this and it worked but NOT along side traditional VM email (unix) accounts. I think VM in the Sasl smtp.conf file uses 'pwcheck_method: saslauthd' where the PostfixAdmin version uses 'pwcheck_method: auxprop'. ! don't know if it can do both types of checks or maybe different sasl config files pointed too from the 2 entries in master.conf. I'm not even sure if I'm talking sense here!

IDEAL CHOICES Do it all in VM but PostfixAdmin is also OK for pure virtual users. If that means moving all Unix mailbox users to pure virtual ones then how do I do that? They don't really need to be Unix users at all.

i know mySQL is frowned on and I agree its another mechanism with overheads to keep running however the tutorials out there don't seem to use postfix flat 'hashed maps'.

So my question really is can VMPro do what I want? If so is there a Howto somewhere?

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Howdy -- well, Virtualmin doesn't support virtual users within Postfix. They'd need to exist as system users somewhere.

Normally, that means having them in /etc/passwd.

However, an alternative is to use LDAP, which would allow you to store the users in the LDAP service and not in /etc/passwd.

We feel LDAP offers a lot of complexity, and we don't recommend that setup unless you have a significant amount of users (tens of thousands), or multiple servers. We recommend the default of storing them in /etc/passwd.

However, if you're interested in LDAP, you can read about setting it up here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/id,combining_virtualmin_and_ldap/