Hi. I've been racking my brain on a project I've been working on for work, and hope someone here might be of assistance. Basically I'm trying to create dynamically generated .forward files for users/aliases on my email server. The intent is for these files to be generated automatically any time there is a personnel change at the company.
For example, I have a 'sales' email account setup that acts to forward any emails sent to it to all the actual staff emails listed in my mySQL database as part of the sales group. We have a web interface for modifying/assigning such groups to staff members, and this info is stored in the database.
What I'm trying to figure out is, once an assignment is made through this interface, how can I automatically update the .forward files through PHP telling the server to update the .forward files. It seems the only way to do this is to be running as root, but from what I gather, it's a security risk to gain root access in the PHP script itself. Ideally the script would just somehow signal root to update the .forward files for the appropriate email accounts. Rather than have a cron job create these .forward files at set intervals, I'd rather the changes be made instantaneously any time the .forward files need to be updated. Any ideas?