creating users with mail but no system login

Bob livingsky at gmail.com
Wed Jul 27 14:44:38 UTC 2016


On 2016-07-26 02:13 PM, David Fletcher wrote:
> On Tue, 2016-07-26 at 12:41 -0600, Bob wrote:
>> I want to create users who only have email privileges on my system. I am
>> using postfix but not virtual mailboxes. I have people I would like to
>> supply a mail address for under a common domain, but they don't need any
>> other access to my system. We are in different cities and provinces, so
>> I would also need to provide some kind of mail relay for them. I know I
>> can do 'adduser --system --disabled login' but that seems like it would
>> block mail login as well. How would I do this?
>>
>>
> On my server, only used by two people, I also use postfix, with maildir,
> which is putting the email into the users' home directories. So I
> suppose that unless there is some setting in the postfix/dovecot config
> files to mess around with the user accounts and home directories need to
> be there.
>
> HOWEVER, what I have also done is turn off the password logins. The only
> way to log in to the server now, to get at all the "normal" files using
> say sshfs, is to use ssh keys. If you do the same with your server, your
> users should still be able to access the email server in the usual way
> but will not be able to log in via ssh because you as administrator will
> not have put any ssh public keys in their /home/username/.ssh
> directories.
>
> Does that help?
>
> Dave
>
>
>
Well, I decided to try and create the users. I did 'adduser 
--shell=/bin/false --groupid generalgroup username and it worked. Since 
I am using postfix with maildir I figured they needed a home directory 
for the maildir and it really doesn't take up that much space, so I 
think I am happy.




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