Two questions on the topic of virtual mail users:
Is it possible to virtualise mail users and thus avoid the creation of system user accounts for each mail account?
If it’s currently not possible are there any plans to provide this capability in the future?
Howdy,
No, that’s not currently possible when using Postfix and Dovecot.
Note though that with that setup, users are all created with “/dev/null” as their shell, so they’re unable to login via SSH and FTP.
Virtualmin does support using Qmail and Vpopmail, which supports virtual users. However, this doesn’t provide as broad a featureset as Postfix and Dovecot – it’s also not supported as well, and isn’t as well tested. So we don’t recommend it 
So, although we don’t recommend that route, if you want to give it a try, you can enable that in System Settings -> Virtualmin Config, and there you can change “Mail server to configure”. If you’re using something other than the default, you would need to install the necessary packages for that.
It’s not possible to migrate users from one mail server type to another – so changing that is simplest when starting on a freshly installed system. It would also work to generate backups, and to restore those backups onto a system that’s configured to use your preferred mail server type.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any immediate plans to build support for virtual users in Postfix and Dovecot.
-Eric
I appreciate your prompt, and useful reply. Just one thing that puzzles my ignorant brain:
I’ve been looking at ISPConfig as well and using Postfix and Dovecot it seems to virtualise users. If that’s the case then forgive me but I don’t understand your last sentence which seems to imply that it’s a constraint with Postfix and Dovecot that stops you doing the same.
What am I missing?
I meant that there wasn’t immediate plans of building such support within Virtualmin for that setup.
-Eric
Understood. Thank you.