Re: LDAP and e-mail

[Mark Wilcox <mewilcox@unt.edu>]

Hi,
Yes we do it on a small testing scale here at UNT with a full-bore production
being ready for late Spring 99.

Exchange uses a module that allows you to access it's email address book from a
LDAP client. I heard Pine had LDAP capabilities but I have not tried them out.
Netscape and IE both allow you to search any LDAP server you wish. Netscape 4.5
(released a 2 weeks ago) has an added capability that it will auto-complete
against any LDAP compliant server, not just a local address book. I have tried
Netscape's address book against Netscape DS 1&3, Exchange and Novell's Groupwise
LDAP plugin. I haven't tried against OpenLDAP or UMich because I don't have
either one of those setup on a machine against which I can hit across a network,
but you shouldn't have any problems.

I believe the latest Sendmail allows you to search against LDAP for email
aliasing, so it can operate in a similar fashion to Exchange if you need to make
it appear like Exchange to managment types. :) Except of course this will likely
run faster and be much more available than your Exchange server. :)


Mark



Andy C. Brandt wrote:

> Hello,
>
> does anyone here use LDAP to provide a way of searching e-mail addresses?
>
> My interest in LDAP is caused by the fact that I'm trying to figure out what
> would be needed to provide the functionality of MS Exchange Server using
> Linux and open source tools. That's what a company asks for if they are to
> consider switching their e-mail handling to Linux. As we all know basic
> e-mail + POP3/IMAP are easy to provide. However, Exchange provides something
> more - some kind of centrally managed address books. As far as I was able to
> figure out this is based on LDAP, but I don't know exactly how it works (in
> part because of my Unix/Linux background I don't know MS "solutions" well).
>
> Maybe someone here is coping with a similar problem or is using LDAP to
> provide address books to mail clients, I would be very interested in
> exchanging information (mainly asking some questions).
>
> --
> /-------------------+---------------------+--------------------------------\
> I Andrzej K. Brandt I andy@pilgrim.ml.org | HP:  http://mnich.ml.org/~andy |
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