Construction of Mail Hosting System Based on Authentication Database

Abstract

There is increasing interesting against hosting service for mail servers in a university network, in order to reduce security risks caused by unskilled administrators. This paper explains a mail hosting system which has two features. The first feature is a delegation mechanism based on the tree structure of the authentication database and its access control list, which makes a domain administrator use his/her own password for authentication and allows administration actions to administrators based on the list of their account names. The second feature is that no mail spool is prepared for domains but mail boxes for users are only prepared. The second feature minimises privileges of domain administrators and makes the mail hosting system secure.