Remote access to a user's mail spool

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Matt Juszczak
>Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 11:57 AM
>To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: Remote access to a user's mail spool
>
>
>Hi all,
>
>We're an ISP, and we are currently looking for a way for our 
>tech support 
>guys to access customer's email without having shell access to 
>the server, 
>or knowing the customer's password.
>

Matt, you need to load Webmin and try it out on one of your systems.

Under System, Sendmail, there's an icon for User mailboxes
that will allow this.

You can lock webmin down so that your first level tech people
can only do this and a few other administrative tasks, they
cannot reboot the server, etc.

>We'd like to install a custom webmail client on our private 
>internal LAN 

Already done, see webmin.  Also unnecessary as webmin does SSL
and has it's own webserver, no Apache needed.

>webserver that would only show the user's inbox and the ability 
>to delete 
>the messages (couldn't read messages, etc.).  The problem is 
>that we would 
>have to know the user's password in order for my PHP script to 
>go out and 
>fetch the mail.
>

No, not the case.  The root user can do this.  Webmin runs as root
but has a complete internal security system setup.  You add users
and passwords into webmin that are just for webmin, not for the
server.

http://www.webmin.com

Ted