Applied Research And Implementation Of LDAP-Based Mail System With Multiple Mail Domains

Email Service is one of the primitive services of the Internet, and the most important one as well. With the rapid development of Internet within these years, the number of people using Email is booming, which brings lots of new problems to the system administrator in managing the Email system. While, as a new service, directory service begins to be adopted widely. Adopting Directory Service to solve the problems of traditional Email system has become one of the research tasks in the application of Internet in recent years.This paper firstly sets about the relevant protocols which are used in the Mail System and Directory Service, and expatiates the operational principle of Mail System, POP, IMAP and Directory Service. After that, it induces the occasions that LDAP can be applied and the environment that LDAP can supports, then it concludes the aspects which need to be improved in the existing Mail System.With the rapid increasing of the number of people using Email on Internet, many ISPs have to develop the framework of their Email System to satisfy the demand of providing a number of corporations the email services on one single machine or several ones. Because each corporation has its own domain name, it urges the Email System to have the ability to manage multiple mail domains. But a single mail server can only support one mail domain during its running in the existing Email System. This paper explores the methods and the processes of managing multiple mail domains via LDAP, and implements this application, which makes use of some free source software and integrates with Qmail MTA in the Unix/Linux environment.Meanwhile, in a large scale Email System which may distribute the mail services on several physically separate machines, a simple management interface which can be easily mastered is very useful for the system administrators. This paper introduces a implementation based on Web service, which carries out the management of multiple domains and mail user accounts stored in the LDAP Directory Information Tree. With one PC or workstation, administrators can perform some important work of the system management through web browser. Thisapplication is quite practically significant for better interaction between system administrators and the mail system control based on LDAP.This paper also presents a low-cost solution of using free software to construct an open webmail system, which can make the email services more perfect. The basic function and frame of the webmail system are given out.With the development of Internet and the appearance of new application, the function of Mail System must be extended continuously in order to meet new needs, which urges us to put forward more suggestions on the revise of protocols related to email.