Please note that this site is a reference for qmail users. It's not designed to be easy to use -- it's designed to be comprehensive. There are things in here which have sharp edges! If you're looking for a tutorial site, visit Dave Sill's excellent Life With Qmail site.

qmail is a modern SMTP server which makes sendmail obsolete, written by Dan Bernstein, who also has a web page for qmail. qmail is a secure package. You can download netqmail 1.06 (Redhat RPMs, and Debian .debs, HP-UX, Gentoo, and OpenBSD ports) and redistribute qmail for free. You can get the "big picture" of how qmail is organized. You should read Life with qmail.

There is a discussion list and an announcements list for qmail users, maintained by Dan Bernstein using qmail, of course. There's also an archive. You can search it. It's also archived at The Aims Group, at Gossamer Threads, and in Mailbox-format archives. Charles Cazabon has written some guidelines for posting to the list. There is also an FAQ, providing answers to frequently-asked questions. qmail is now open source.

Dan's updated FAQ is also available in other file formats, and in Spanish.

A number of large Internet sites are using qmail: USA.net's outgoing email, Address.com, Rediffmail.com, Colonize.com, Yahoo! mail, Network Solutions, Verio, MessageLabs (searching 100M emails/week for malware), listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu (a big listserv hub, using qmail since 1996), Ohio State (biggest US University), Yahoo! Groups, Listbot, USWest.net (Western US ISP), Telenordia, gmx.de (German ISP), NetZero (free ISP), Critical Path (email outsourcing service w/ 15M mailboxes), PayPal/Confinity, Hypermart.net, Casema, Pair Networks, Topica, MyNet.com.tr, FSmail.net, Mycom.com, and vuurwerk.nl.

Charles Cazabon, Dave Sill, Henning Brauer, Peter Samuel, and Russell Nelson have put together a netqmail-1.06 distribution of qmail. It is comprised of qmail-1.03 plus the recommended patches and some documentation.

Table of Contents:

• [addons]
• [author's software]
• [books]
• [commercial support]
• [checkpassword]
• [ezmlm]
• [high-volume servers]
• [maildir]
• [Microsoft virus prevention]
• [news] qmail news is also available as a news channel, and a Slashdot slashbox.
• [Recommended patches]
• [spam prevention]
• [tips]
• [user software]
• [user documentation]

 

		Commercial Support
	Commercial support is available for qmail. Crynwr Software. Support is available on-site, by phone, or over the Internet. 1-315-323-1241 or FWD# 404529. James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson, offers assessment, installation, support, training, and documentation for qmail and related software, specializing in low-maintenance, rock-solid anti-spam, anti-virus solutions for small- and medium-size organizations. Saffron Solutions is a customer-focused IT services company offering computer system, network, and security consulting and systems integration. Based in Boston, MA, Saffron Solutions provides qmail and other open source software support to customers in the US and Canada. bettercom (located in Hamburg, Germany) provides support, installation and administration services for qmail and open-source software in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Andrew Richards is a qmail solutions specialist: Straightforward support, consultancy, maintenance and troubleshooting services for qmail and related systems. Design and installation of new qmail-based systems - any size, any location. Tel. +44 1142 789 884. G-Tech Consulting offers high-quality services and support contracts at the lowest prices. We offer support for Qmail, Webmail, Courier-Imap, djbdns, etc and a wide variety of open-source software such as Apache, ProFTPD, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. David Harris, author of open source qmail addons, provides expert qmail support and installation through his firm DRH Internet. Call toll free at 866-374-4678; internationally 410-461-5316. Inter7 provides qmail support world-wide: remote access or at your location. Call toll free in the U.S. at 866.528.3530, Internationally at 815.776.9465 or via Voip at sip:support@inter7.com Quist Consulting provides support for qmail in Canada, the USA and elsewhere over the Internet. AiDA Systems offers Qmail, Webmail AntiVirus, AntiSpam, and djbdns support. We also offer high-availability, clustering, redundancy, load balancing (layer 4 switching, round-robin dns) and failover services for medium/large ISP's. We also support migration from Windows/Unix platforms to any Unix platform (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, others) Call 209.639.2989 BlackMesh provides a full range of qmail services, from consulting to shared qmail servers and dedicated qmail servers. In addition to qmail support, BlackMesh provides a full range of consulting and hosting--from shared to dedicated--services. 888.473.0854 iBase Technologies from Hong Kong offers qmail based corporate email solutions for the Asian region. Solutions include corporate email solutions, anti-spam/anti-virus, high-volume servers, consultancy and system administration services. Ross Cooney from Rozmic provide support for qmail to European based organisations and ISP's. Rozmic also provide a managed spam filtration service called EmailCloud which is built upon qmail. RIEGER - Consulting & Management offers consulting, installaton and adminstrative services for qmail, djbdns and other software including help with general server tasks to customers located in Germany and nearby countries. LinuxIS Consulting provides consulting, installation, and support services for qmail, djbdns, and most other DJB-ware and Open Source software. Accepts Visa, M/C, American Express and Paypal. Clearly Connected provides contractual and by-the-hour support for qmail and other MTAs. We have a great deal of expertise in qmail on Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Excello provides support for wide range of qmail applications for SMB & Enterprise customers in the Germany and Czech republic. They also run excellent high performance antispam and antivirus solution on qmail platform known as Virusfree.cz. LinuxMagic Inc. Offers high volume mail server support for ISP's and Enterprise throughout the world. They have published free qmail support tools. Also specializing in Anti-Spam solutions, Integration, High Performance Tuning. Located in Canada, 24/7 support contracts also available. Advanced Consulting Group - Los Angeles based Qmail installation and support. Support for spam filtering, large deployments, and 24/7 support. Support all unix platforms. Call toll free (888) 595-9775. Disch Services GmbH (located near Nuremberg, Germany) is providing professional services for open source software. The company is running also e-mail servers with qmail for her german customers.

 

		User-Contributed Documentation
	Documentation contributed by users qmail manual pages converted to HTML as a tarball, and individually. Michael Samuel collected some documentation for qmail. It is no longer accessible and is not being maintained. Arjen van Drie has a mirror. Paul Gregg has written instructions on how to configure qmail to handle many mail users (multiple email addresses) with separate POP3 accounts - without using system accounts. Djalil Chafaď has written «Introduction ŕ qmail», an introduction to qmail for french speaking users. Chris Johnson wrote something called "The qmail newbie's guide to relaying", which is supposed to answer most of the relaying questions that come across the qmail list. Adam D. McKenna has written a qmail HOWTO. Dave Sill has written Life with qmail. Erwin Hoffmann was supposed to give a German-language QMAIL presentation at a congress of the German Unix User Group (GUUG) (http://www.guug.de). However, the whole congress was canceled thus the presentation is more or less "virtual". Dave Kitabjian has some diagnostic suggestions for various qmail problems on his Q-Cards page. Philip Jacob wrote up some instructions on using checkpoppasswd to create virtual users on virtual hosts, accessing their mail via pop3. Davide Giunchi has written an Italian qmail HOWTO, this Italian language document explains how to install, configure and run qmail. This isn't a translation of the English "qmail howto" but is written from scratch. Oliver Lehmann has written a German FreeBSD qmail-howto. Steven Fettig has translated Chapters 1-4 into English. Patrick contributes an xinetd configuration for qmail-pop3d. Ismail Yenigul has written a Turkish qmail-howto. Qmail-VmailMgr-Courier-SquirrelMail installation guide, written by Konstantin Riabitsev. Martin Östlund has written a Swedish qmail-howto. Rene Schleicher has written a qmail/vpopmail-Installation HOWTO in German. Looking for information on how to add a disclaimer to your outgoing email? Daniele Ripanti and Marco Rocchetti have written a HOWTO in Italian describing a qmail installation on FreeBSD with POP3, IMAP, Mailing list, Antivirus, Antispam support and webmail. Reza Gamal has written a qmail guide in Indonesian. Michel Morelli is running an Italian-language list. Paul Niewiadomski has translated man pages into Polish. Actually, he's Paweł Niewiadomski, but you need an 8859-2 character set to properly render his name. I can't wait for UTF-8 to be supported everywhere. Marco Tizzoni has translated Life With Qmail into Italian. Mário Gamito has some Portuguese documentation. Asfihani has written Installing Qmail With vmailmgr and vpopmail in Indonesian language. He also covers omail admin, courier-imap and squirrelmail. Ciprian has three benchmark articles comparing sendmail, qmail, and PostFix. Andrew St. Jean describes his qmail configuration and using qmail's null client, Courier IMAP, and TMDA. John M. Simpson is running courier-imap under daemontools. Kris Kelley has Gentoo installation instructions. Frank Niedermann has written a HowTo install qmail on Debian in German language. Jeffrey Clement wrote up a Debian HOWTO on setting up qmail, Vmailmgr, CourierIMAP, SpamAssassin, and ezmlm. Sylvestre Ledru wrote some bits on using spam assassin with qmail. Roberto Lacava has Italian installation instructions for qmail on Red Hat 9. Erwin Hoffmann has compiled a tutorial about SMTP Authentication (as part of my canceled Qmail Book) which is available in english language. Readers will find an updated version of Krysztof Dabrowski's SMTP Auth patch which should cleanly interface with eg. netqmail-1.04. Larry M. Smith has written instructions for using qmail as a honeypot. Sumanth NS has a qmail + UUCP how-to. Bill Shupp has installation instructions for a qmail toaster. No, not to make crispy bread, but instead to put together qmail, patches, and ancillary software into one installation. Lukas Feiler has instructions for installing qmail with TLS and SMTP auth,... Courier-IMAP/POP3, MySQL, Clam AV, SpamAssassin - all with virtual domain support. Mark Steele wrote up some notes on Setting up a Qmail front-end for M$ Exchange server Roberto Puzzanghera has written an English/Italian HOWTO, which explains how to put together the latest versions of netqmail, vpopmail, dovecot, roundcube webmail, spamassassin, clamav, simscan and some and related software.

[index]

 

		Author's Enhancement Software for qmail
	Enhancements and additions to qmail by its author, Dan Bernstein. ezmlm has its own section. The serialmail package delivers mail from a Maildir to an SMTP server. The Unix Client-Server TCP package makes ordinary Unix programs into TCP/IP servers and/or clients. In particular its tcpserver program should be used with qmail instead of inetd. This package now includes Dan's rblsmtpd package for blocking spam using the RBL. Gerrit Pape has written man pages for ucspi-tcp-0.88, daemontools-0.70, and daemontools-0.76 to complement Dan's online HTML documentation. Interestingly, William Baxter announced ucspi-ipc and Bruce Guenter announced ucspi-unix within two days of each other. Same idea, different implementations. Bruce Guenter also has written ucspi-proxy. It passes data back and forth between two connections set up by a UCSPI server and a UCSPI client. William Baxter wrote ucspi-ssl which uses OpenSSL to encrypt connections. Scott Gifford has written an implementation of UCSPI-TLS for qmail, which adds STARTTLS (RFC 2487) support to qmail-smtpd and STLS (RFC 2595) support to qmail-pop3d while isolating the encryption in a low-privilege process for security. You can get UCSPI-TLS patches for qmail, sslserver, and mailfront, along with a detailed UCSPI-TLS on qmail HOWTO. Levent Serinol wrote a simple patch which adds mysql support to tcpserver. The daemontools package monitors, controls, and logs the execution and output of long-running programs, often called daemons. Tetsu Ushijima wrote qmail-conf, which creates an appropriate set of files to use daemontools to start up qmail services. The qmailanalog package analyzes qmail log files in various ways. Russ Allbery has written tai64nfrac, which converts the tai64n that daemontools-0.63 produces into the fractional seconds that qmailanalog expects. Peter Samuel has implemented the same idea as a patch to daemontools using Dan's coding style (Jay Soffian also wrote one substantially similar to Peter's). Finally (hopefully) John Levine went ahead and fixed qmailanalog to accept tai64n dates. Georg Lehner has made qmailanalog better integrated with multilog. The dot-forward package emulates sendmail's .forward file processing. The fastforward package supports forwarding tables under qmail. Mirko Zeibig has an RPM with fastforward with a .qmail-default and a "standard" /etc/aliases-file in it. The checkpassword package authenticates users using a generic interface. It is required by qmail's included POP3 server. Dan has a checklist for users converting from sendmail to qmail. Dan has written a reference manual for SMTP. You can't find a more secure DNS server than djbdns. If you thought the DNS was hard to understand, you're wrong. It's not the DNS that's difficult -- it's just BIND. If you just want to publish information via the web or ftp and you don't want to worry about security holes, consider using publicfile. ezmlm-showctl prints out the ezmlm configuration in a readable manner.

[index]

 

		User-Contributed Software for Qmail
	General software contributed by users and supporters of qmail. Harald Hanche-Olsen has written some code to do dot-locking. Dot-locking is slightly unreliable, so Dan doesn't support it in qmail. Seth Alves hacked on maildir.module-970707 until it worked (mostly) with imap-4.1.BETA. Mattias Larsson wrote a preliminary patch to IMAP4rev1 which lets it work with Maildirs. David Harris has improved that patch to make a production quality UW-imap server with Maildir support. And in his turn, Herbie has updated the Maildir patch for the latest UW IMAP server. David Summers has a qmail-imap Linux RPM. This is a version of the IMAP/POP server that works with QMAIL, using Mattias's patches. The three differences are: Mail is delivered and picked up from ~user/Mailbox Mail can be delivered and picked up from ~user/Maildir/ (see README.maildir) CRAM-MD5 authentication has been added to the IMAP server. Sam Varshavchik wrote a Maildir-only IMAP server called Courier IMAP. Ali Lomonaco has a patch for finger so it knows to look in $HOME for a Mailbox. It was written for the finger from FreeBSD 2.2.2, which is probably the standard BSD finger. Giles Lean didn't like the idea of patching majordomo, so following a suggestion from J.T. Conklin that he found in the list archives he wrote a majordomo-inject script and some documentation on how to use it. Needs Perl 5.004. Nathan J. Mehl has thrown together a bourne shell script to automagically create all of the necessary aliases for a majordomo list with digests in a Qmail environment that uses Giles majordomo-inject. Julie Baumler is using UIUC's ph to redirect mail on her mail hub. She wrote a note on how to configure qmail to use ph. Russell Nelson's checkhomeownership script will report on users who don't own their home directories or Maildirs. This is important to run before starting up qmail, because sendmail doesn't care a whit whether the user owns their home directory, but home directory ownership is how qmail decides if the user exists or not. If you have a mail hub, and you've botched the home directory ownership, the users will never be logging into it, so they won't notice. And you won't notice either, until they run screaming to you that they haven't gotten the important mail they wanted, and their correspondent noted that the mail bounced. David Summers has some perl scripts that work with maildir2smtp. Now uses APOP-style authentication. Russell Nelson's newbox script to create new maildrops for users who don't have login accounts on their mail server. Chris Garrigues wrote a program to pretty-print Received: lines. Brian T. Wightman has written a delayed-mail notifier. Mark Delany has a rmail for people receiving ! addresses via UUCP. It parses ! addresses, applies a number of simple pattern matching rules to convert them to FQDN addresses and injects them into qmail. Russell Nelson has a program to eliminate duplicate messages. It has two modes of operation -- strict and loose. Strict only eliminates perfect duplicates, whose only difference is in the Received: lines. Loose eliminates duplicates that have identical From: Date:, Message-Id: and body parts. Peter Samuel has expanded on Russell's program and written a duplicate eliminator that uses dbm hash file(s) instead of a text file. It also has improved exception handling and provisions for sites without the MD5 perl module. Russ Allbery uses Majordomo with qmail. He has a FAQ on the subject. David Harris has a system to only allow hosts who have authenticated via the POP3 server to relay mail using qmail. This does not require patching the POP or SMTP servers, but is implemented by two programs which cleanly interface into the system, and can work with most any POP or IMAP server. Petr Novotny wrote an alternative to Russell Nelson's Open-SMTP patch for checkpassword. His code is a PAM module which calls external program to log $TCPREMOTEIP. It requires a PAM-enabled checkpassword. Mark Willcox wrote postpop, which is a simpler SMTP after POP solution. Michele Beltrame has a tool to view the qmail queue (with colored display), view messages in it and delete messages. It's very simple and written in Perl. Jeremy Kister wrote a qmail-queue manipulation tool. Keith Burdis has written several qmail programs, including dotqmail2alias, alias2dot, deliver, and compactor/exploder Eric Huss has released queue-fix 1.4. It repairs or generates a qmail queue structure. You can use this to help move your queue location, or if you regenerate the file system and the inode numbering changes. It will also fix permissions and ownerships of the files. Eric reports that Matthew Harrell wrote a patch to queue-fix which makes it work with Russ Nelson's big-todo patch. Patches upon patches! Harald Hanche-Olsen has a shell/awk/gnu-find script which renames a queue so that it has the right filenames (corresponding to inodes). Charles Cazabon wrote queue_repair. queue-repair is a qmail queue diagnostic and repair tool, written in Python, and licensed under the GPL. Peter Samuel has a qmail-compatible vacation program. Jason van Zyl has a patch to the cyrus imap server so that it authenticates out of a cdb (the same hash format that users/assign uses) instead of kerberos or /etc/passwd. And he has a perl script that allow you to enter users into the system and it takes care of updating the users/assign file, and the cdb file that cyrus is using to authenticate from. Bruce Guenter wrote qlogtools, a set of tools useful in analyzing or producing logs from qmail and other packages. Monte Mitzelfelt has a program which sorts a qmail log file by message delivery. Ismail Yenigul has a qmail log analyzer tool called IsoQlog. Bruce Guenter wrote his own implementation of the mini-qmail idea, only his (nullmailer) has a queue for more reliablity. It supports SMTP and QMQP, so it's a drop-in replacement for qmail-qmqpc. Eric Hess needed longer timeouts for qmqpc. The timeouts are hard coded in qmail-qmqpc. They tend to be on the low side (10 seconds to connect, 60 seconds to read/write). He uses some automated systems with qmqp and sometimes the servers are overloaded and can't respond in that timeframe. Jay Austad has his qmqpc rotating the server list by a random amount. This distributes the load over multiple qmqp servers. There are a number of web interfaces for reading mailboxes: Sam Varshavchik's sqwebmail. horde.org's IMP. Requires PHP and an IMAP/POP3 server. @. Twig. No frames, no javascript. oMail-webmail is a simple Webmail solution for mail servers based on qmail and optionally vmailmgr. This a GPL project, maintained by Olivier Müller. The mails are read directly from Maildirs on the harddisk, which is much quicker than using protocols like POP3 or IMAP. Other features includes multiple language support (currently English, French, German and Italian), folders and addressbook support. oMail is programmed in Perl. Developers and translators are welcome to subscribe to the devel mailing list. iGENUS is a chinese webmail system for perl + qmail + vpopmail + mysql. Atmail is a complete Webmail client for qmail supporting POP3/IMAP accounts. Streamlined interface supporting Ajax and multiple Webmail templates and themes. VisualOffice supports Maildir++. Several autoresponders are available: Eric Huss has written a rate-limited autoresponder. Bruce Guenter updated his autoresponder based on Eric's design. Vyacheslav Ignatyuk wrote an alpha version of a qmail manager module for webmin. It's a first alpha version, so may be unstable. Peter Green has some code to Archive and process log files generated by qmail-send and qmail-smtpd. William E. Baxter has released qtools, a suite of utilities for use in .qmail files. The tools support applying a filter to a message body, message head, or entire message; conditional delivery of a message to a Maildir; and configuration of simple autorepliers. Sam Varshavchik has a local delivery agent called Maildrop that has a custom filtering language more readable than procmail's. Russell Nelson has a program called no-alternative, which picks the text/plain part out of a MIME multipart/alternative message, and forwards it to $USER-alternative. Russell Nelson and Magnus Bodin have conspired to write some scripts and documentation to throw information about qmail into mrtg. Inter7 has their own MRTG configuration Chris Dent wrote Qmail::Queue.pm. oMail-admin is a PHP4-based Web-administration solution for mail servers based on Dan Bernstein's qmail and Bruce Guenter's vmailmgr. Dru Nelson has an incoming message filter Dru Nelson has an administrator's program to remove queued mail that has a certain string in it. LinuxMagic has written qmail-remove to remove emails from the queue. If they match a string, they are moved to a temporary directory. Mail2DB -- Store incoming mail in a PostgreSQL database. Mail2DB is suitable for putting in a .qmail/.forward file and will archive e-mail to a SQL database. Currently, there is only the storage component. This was written because somone on a LUG list expressed interest in such a system, but he only knew PHP (which isn't an ideal language for calling from a .qmail file ;-). Hopefully a user interface will be forthcoming. Russ Nelson has a qmtpd tarball for people using 0.70 or later daemontools with qmail. Just drop it into your /service directory, and five seconds later, you're running qmtpd. Don't forget to set your lowest MX priority to 12801, or all your deliveries will occur using SMTP. This is a companion to his qmail-remote patch. Vmailadmin is a web application that allow your client to administer the pop accounts in his domain, easily and with security, without the need to contact ISP staff. Alex Kramarov has created qmail-print-queue to print the qmail queue contents - it runs on all messages and displayes the from:, to: and date: headers; can also dump the full header of the message if ran with "-h" switch (if mess822 is properly installed). It is useful in conjunction with monitoring tools like qmail-mrtg and others. Andrew Richards has written a set of tools for managing multiple virtual domains using hashing to distribute maildirs called qmail-hashdir. Mahlon Smith has written a general new mail checker, useful if you use the mutt MUA and procmail to filter incoming mail to Maildirs, since there isn't a built in mechanism for doing this from within mutt. qmail-qsanity-0.52 checks your queue data structures for internal consistency. If it finds any problems, it prints a warning to stderr. Plans are to change it to generate shell commands which will correct the problems. qmail-lint-0.55 checks your qmail configuration for common problems. Prints warning or error messages to stdout. Davide Giunchi wrote qmail-masq[uerade]. It will masquerade the internal address with an external one when sending email from local network users to the external internet users. Todd A. Jacobs has a program to generate random extension addresses. Wolfgang Pichler wanted graphs from logs, so he wrote qmailalizer. Bruce Guenter wrote mailfront, a package containing customizeable network front-ends for mail servers; specifically SMTP and POP3. Supports SMTP auth and POP3 AUTH PLAIN and LOGIN. Mark Delany wrote set_supplementary_groups, which lets you gain group permissions for the groups you are in in /etc/group. In particularly mailman requires this. LinuxMagic is porting their Anti-Spam/Valid User checking program, magic-smtpd, a drop-in replacement for qmail-smtpd over to opensource. Features checking for Valid Users, Spam conditions, and smtpd RCPT-TO rate limiting, all at the smtpd level to reduce server loads before it hits the queue. Supports stock qmail, qmail/vpopmail, and LinuxMagic Mailserver installs. Larry Engleman has a Qt GUI installer Andreas Aardal Hanssen has written Binc IMAP. It's invoked just like qmail-pop3d so it fits in smoothely in a vanilla qmail system. Works fine with vhkpwd or any checkpassword-compatible authenticators. John Wiggins has a C/C++ CGI program for the control of qmail. Erwin Hoffmann wrote Newanalyse, helping the sysadmin in processing multilog logfiles. Erwin Hoffmann wrote QMVC - Qmail Mail and Virus Control is an unidirectional Mail Filter and Virus Scanner for Qmail. It runs from your .qmail file. Ian Stewart wrote qmail-logfilter, which discards the DATA phase of an smtp session. N. Ersen Siseci wrote Zabit, a C-language qmail content filter. EnderUNIX has updated qsheff, a qmail-queue replacement to filter mail traffic and more. It supports body filtering, subject filtering, attachment filtering, quarantine, white/black list, single line logging for qmail and many features. Russ Nelson wrote qmail-dk, which is a qmail-queue replacement that signs and verifies DomainKeys signatures. Building on Gentoo Sorrawut Korsuwansiri wrote qmail-track, which he uses to locate all the logfile records associated with a particular pair of email addresses. Inter7 has updated simscan, a qmail-queue replacement to reject unwanted email. Simscan is a simple program that enables qmail-smtpd to reject viruses, spam, and block attachments during the SMTP conversation so the email never makes it into your computers. It is completely open source and uses other open source components. Very efficient and written in C. Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written with security primarily in mind. Niki Denev wrote qstat-gid. It prints info about the messages in the qmail queue sorted per GID. He uses it to quickly see if any user sends excessive amounts of mail/spam and fills the queue. Skaarup has written a package for analyzing logfiles for a lot of Dan's tools. Folkert van Heusden wrote multitail, which monitors multiple logfiles. MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). Richard Lyons wants to sign messages using domainkeys after verh has modified the message, so he added code to qmail-remote to [re]sign the message. EZIX has a NoRelaySMTP, which writes email directly into a user's Maildir. Chris Hardie has written a program to migrate from IMail Server to qmail/vpopmail. Ed Neville hass a patch to not bounce email with many Delivered-To headers. He says that sometimes spammers cotton on to the idea that qmail bounces mail which has multiple delivered-to lines. Sometimes this can be a pathetic attempt to use a mail server to fan out junk.

[index]

 

		User-Contributed Maildir Support
	Maildir-specific software contributed by qmail users. Maildir is a lock-free mailbox standard which is reliable over NFS. Chris Mosley has a program which loops on maildir2mbox so that programs like Elm can continue to receive mail without needing to exit and reenter. Relies on Ivan Kohler's mbox2maildir. Ivan Kohler has a mbox2maildir program. Gets its parameters fron the MAIL and MAILDIR environment variables. Russell Nelson's convert-and-create script will create Maildirs for all users who receive mail and will convert their /var/spool/mail mbox-format mailboxes into messages in a Maildir. Stuart Bain has improved it so it will convert UW-IMAP mboxes into Courier-IMAP maildirs. Bruce Guenter changed the above convert-and-create script to convert a single user. Gets its parameters from the command line. Valerio Granato has also done a convert-and-create variation. Todd Underwood has written Yet Another Mailbox to Mailbox Converter. The ultimate mbox2maildir has not yet been invented. However, Robin Whittle has created another mbox2maildir. This one can do entire directories of mboxes. Matthew C. Mead has a ``from'' program that prints a summary of mail in a maildir waiting to be read. Russ Allbery has his own maildir summary program. Same idea as Matt's but a slightly different philosophy. Mutt is a MUA that has native support for Maildirs. Mikko Hänninen has a patch to Mutt which converts GMT dates in the header into local time. Bloodhounds International wrote maildir patches for the c-client library (now distributed by Adam McKenna), which is used by Pine and IMAP2. Dean Gaudet has a patch to it that lets you work with multiple inboxes. Ragnar Kjřrstad has adjusted the maildir patches for pine 4.00 to work with pine 4.10, and imapd 4.5. And similarly Sean Cody has a maildir patch for pine 4.33. And similarly Jozef Hitzinger and Adam Slattery for pine 4.58, including Dean Gaudet's maildir-1billion fix GPL'ed MUA, called Mew and IM support qmail's Maildir. Mew is interface for Emacs/XEmacs. IM is perl scripts for process mail like MH. Paul Gregg has a script which runs from a .qmail file that checks a Maildir for a quota (clearly only effective on a userless mailhub). The script is called mailquotacheck. Jeff Hayward has a patch to qmail-local (which arguably belongs down below in the patches section except that Paul Gregg's quota check was already here) which treats quota exceeded as a permanent error, bouncing the message back to the sender. There are various xbiff (X mail notifiers) solutions for maildirs: Mikko Hänninen notes that xbuffy has Maildir patches. He also notes that Brandon Long has rewritten xbuffy from scratch and it's now GBuffy. Tim Mayo says that xbiff works fine with a helper app. Harald Hanche-Olsen also runs xbiff, but has an entry in .qmail. David Mandala enhanced Tim Mayo's xbiff solution. And Philip Hands also got his finger in the pie. Jonathan I. Kamens has the latest and arguably the greatest entry in the Maildir-xbiff category. The comment at the top of the script explains why this one is better. A text-only biff by David Gerber. The Clarkson University Unix Team has an xbiff and from. Tetsu Ushijima has a program called maildirdeliver, which writes a new message into a Maildir. Most of the code is essentially just stolen from qmail-local.c. Len Budney wrote a little C program called safecat, which implements DJB's maildir algorithm to copy stdin to a file in a maildir. When exit codes are checked, as by qmail-local or fetchmail with -w option, it should be as reliable as qmail's own maildir delivery (which heavily influenced the safecat). Jonathan Kamens has written a replacement for the Emacs "movemail" program, which understands how to read mail from a qmail-style maildir. Kenji Rikitake reports that procmail-3.15 includes support of the maildir format with no patch. All you need to do is to add a slash to the mail folder names. Michael Elkins has a tool to synchronize a maildir with a remote IMAP mailbox. nnmaildir is a maildir backend for Gnus. Exim has Maildir support in its appendfile transport. Not exactly new news, but worth mentioning. Gnus has had native maildir support since version 5.8. Also see nnmaildir. Ronald C. Rivera creates home directories and moves email directly from an LDIF file. It also creates the user's public_html directory which can be used in conjunction with mod_ldap_userdir. Nikola Vladov wrote a mbox2maildir in C. Tim Deegan has an RFC1339 remote mail check daemon that works with Maildir mailboxes. Jorge Ventura wrote a qextra2mdir. It takes the extra copy created by FAQ 8.2 and inserts it into a Maildir. Antonio Casado Rodríguez created mdsmon (MailDirSize Monitor)

[index]

 

		EZ Mailing List Manager
	EZ Mailing List Manager (EZMLM) is a mailing list manager which allows users to create their own mailing lists with a single command. Dan Bernstein's ezmlm page. Fred Lindberg and Fred B. Ringel have written an ezmlm FAQ. In addition, Fred L. has also written (in his copious free time) the Ezman, an ezmlm manual for both list owners and users. Fred Lindberg has an add-on to ezmlm-0.53 called ezmlm-idx. It gives you headers, trailers, threaded digests, multi-message get, thread retrieval in MIME multipart/digest with headers filtered to make the digest rfc1153-like (default). It also has all aspects of message moderation, subscription moderation, and remote administration of subscriber addresses. Fred Lindberg is the latest author of code to ensure that an ezmlm subscriber is on the list Fred Lindberg has an EZMLM list splitter. It forwards subscribe/unsubscribe requests from a main list to one of a set of sublists based on the target address (hash or domain name). This way, the list can be split into a number of hosts for load splitting or geographic splitting without inconveniencing the user (who always deals with the main list). Özgür Kesim has a ezmlm HOWTO for advanced mailing lists. Steve Peterson implemented a simple web subscribe/unsubscribe interface to ezmlm. Michael Hirohama wrote Ezmlm-Thresh, which allows EZMLM mailing list messages to be limited to a threshold per subscriber. Guy Antony Halse has a web interface to ezmlm called ezmlm-web, currently at 2.1. It has improvements over Glen Stewart's version. Glen Stewart has improved on Guy Antony Halse's EZmlm-Web 1.02. He's calling his version EZmlm-Web v1.0.2gs1.2. The gs1.2 version suffix modifications are fairly extensive and done by Glen Stewart. Some of the most notable changes in this release include: list owner logon screen & password ListMaster access/control from filtered, configurable IP addresses Only the ListMaster can create and delete lists skeleton support for WebGlimpse indexing of selected list archives spam filter option for list owner addresses tooltip help for all list configuration settings case-insensitive list and subscriber address sorting list owner can change their owner address configuration tour (help) for list owners many other fixes and enhancements Sergiusz Pawlowicz wrote ezmlm-cgi-py, a more approachable (i.e. Python, not djb-C) version of "the Freds" ezmlm-cgi archive formatter.

[index]

 

		Living with Qmail - Tips & Advice
	Some good advice for new qmail users, contributed by qmail users. Did you restart qmail? I find that to be a help for a lot of qmail problems. :-) [John Mitchell] You should also check the permissions very carefully on all of the necessary directories and files. [John Mitchell] You must also put the virtual domain into control/rcpthosts or the mailer will bounce the message with a notice saying that the host wasn't in rcpthosts. [John Mitchell] Of course, you must also be the MX for the virtual hosts. I had a problem in my setup that was driving me nuts until I realized that my DNS provider had missed an MX update request. [John Mitchell] Check all lines in sendmail.cf beginning with M. Any that contain P=[IPC] or P=[TCP] should also have E=\r\n. [Tim Goodwin] You might want to limit posting to mailing lists. The right-hand-side of entries in control/virtualdomains should begin with a username. If you don't use a username, the mail will be handled by ~alias. But if you forget, and create a user by that name, then the mail will suddenly be handled by the user, which is probably not what you intended to happen. Best to use, in this case, alias as the username and avoid trouble. [Russ Nelson] remember to add 'preline' before procmail or other filters when moving .forward to .qmail. [Ira Abramov] If you use qmail's preline utility, remember that preline expects to pipe the entire mail message through the specified program. If the specified program closes standard input before preline has finished, preline will exit with a transient failure and you'll see the following error in your logs: deferral: preline:_fatal:_unable_to_copy_input:_broken_pipe/ You'll see this problem if you try to use the sendmail version of vacation. Use Peter's vacation program instead. [Peter Samuel] Run qmail from an init.d script [Larry Doolittle] You can usually create control/rcpthosts from sed 's/:.*//' <virtualdomains | cat - locals | sort >rcpthosts [Russ Nelson] Sometimes you need to use a database to forward mail. Create ~alias/.qmail-default like this: |if T=`X`; then forward $T; else echo "Sorry, no mailbox here by that name (#5.1.1)"; exit 100; fi That all goes on one line. Fill in the X part with a program that looks up the user, and exits with zero and prints the destination address, or else exits nonzero if no match is found. By the way, the X program probably should ignore case. For NIS, you would replace the X in the above command with: ypmatch $LOCAL aliases . [Russ Nelson] Similarly, you could also use a simple linear search text file named mapping containing lines in the form incoming:outgoing like this: |if MAP=`grep -i "$LOCAL:" mapping` && T=`echo $MAP | awk -F: '{print $2}'` ; then forward $T; else echo "Sorry, no mailbox here by that name (#5.1.1)"; exit 100; fi [Russ Nelson] Anything you print from a program run by a .qmail file ends up in the log file. [Russ Nelson] You can do a reasonable imitation of sendmail delivery, including .forward and /var/spool/mail, with #!/bin/sh exec qmail-start '|dot-forward .forward |preline -f /bin/mail -f "$SENDER" -d "$USER"' splogger qmail depending on your system's binmail interface. Of course, I recommend throwing binmail away, but people who need to preserve /var/spool/mail should still be able to use qmail. [Daniel J. Bernstein] If you want to have private .qmail files which only work on local mail (e.g. a fax gateway), you can put the following test at the beginning of it (all on one line): | if [ -n "`sed -n -e '/invoked from network/p' -e 2q`" ]; then exit 100; else exit 0; fi That is, peek at the headers, if the message came from the network, bounce it, otherwise forward it along. [John R. Levine] [Daniel J. Bernstein] has three suggestions for allowing your users to relay when they're not at a known IP address (which is the FAQ 5.4 solution): Use a secret IP address and port number, and you'll have much better security than user-chosen passwords. Put a secret string into the HELO string sent by the client. This will be visible to the fixup script, so you can reject messages with bad passwords without changing qmail-smtpd---and it's still more widely supported than XTND XMIT. Oh, you want real security? Check that all messages are PGP-signed by local users. I wouldn't be surprised if PGP plugins are available for more clients than XTND XMIT patches are. [Anand Buddhdev] wrote turnmail, modified by Russell Nelson for publication here, which wraps around qmail-pop3d and triggers a serialmail delivery to the connecting host whose user just authenticated themselves. Or, a Unix system can use fetchmail, getmail or an NT system pullmail. Dan Bernstein suggested that one might give ordinary users access to qmail-qread through ucspi. Steinar Haug implemented that suggestion thusly with a client that looks like this: #!/bin/sh exec /local/etc/tcpclient -RHl0 -- 127.0.0.1 20025 sh -c 'exec cat <&6' and he starts the server like this: tcpserver -u126 -g120 -R 127.0.0.1 20025 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qread & The default delivery instructions, which are invoked when a .qmail file is nonexistent or empty, are found in the first parameter of qmail-start. That's why the install instructions tell you to touch .qmail-root .qmail-mailer-daemon and .qmail-postmaster. [Anand Buddhdev] recommends pullmail, which is a Windows NT program that pulls mail from a POP3 server, and stuffs it into NT's SMTP server. [Mark Delany] modifies FAQ 2.3 so he can use the same .qmail file for multiple UUCP sites: Here is our .qmail-uucpfqdn-default file (all on one line) |preline -df /usr/bin/uux - -r -gC -a"$SENDER" `echo $EXT | cut -f2 -d-`!rmail "(${EXT3}@$HOST)" And here is a sample virtualdomains entry: some.domain:uucpfqdn-uuhostname Dan Bernstein noted that qmail will skip dns queries for incoming mail with tcpserver -Hl your.host.name; and you can skip them for outgoing mail with control/smtproutes. Harald Hanche-Olsen has a solution to the problem of mail that has wrongly been queued for a remote host (because, say, you didn't have a host in your locals or virtualdomains): echo tcn.net:[127.0.0.1] >> /var/qmail/control/smtproutes Now send qmail-send an ALRM signal. Hitesh Patel has a patch for UnixWare 2.1.x and 7.0.x, which is not currently supported by qmail. By the way..... the patch above opens up the option of sending mail to root... if you want this then just copy the right files into your qmail source directory... if you don't go into conf-unusual.h and comment out line 25 that says "#define ALLOW_ROOT_MAIL 1". Probably a good idea to comment it out -russ . Daniel J. Bernstein suggests that if you have buggy clients that send bare LFs, and you want to treat their messages the same way sendmail does, you can simply run his fixcrio program instead of qmail-smtpd for your outgoing mail relay. fixcrio then takes qmail-smtpd as argument. fixcrio is part of the ucspi-tcp package. Balazs Nagy likes to watch logs in a virtual terminal (/dev/tty8). He uses ... | tee >(accustamp | tailocal > /dev/tty8) | accustamp | cyclog The extra accustamp seems to be needed to make it work with bash. Frederik Vermeulen says: If you don't want a specific undeliverable mail to sit in the queue any longer, you can make it reach the queuelifetime by running touch -d '1 week ago' on its queue/info file. It will then be bounced after one more delivery attempt. Russ Nelson has used qmail-local to deliver to a dynamic Mailbox or Maildir name. He does it like this: |qmail-local "$USER" "$HOME" "$LOCAL" "" "nodeliver" "$HOST" "$SENDER" "/path/to/users/maildir/here/" Harald Hanche-Olsen warns people to beware when patching Solaris machines, because at least one patch restores the /etc/rc?.d/[SK]??sendmail symlink. You might want to remove files matching that name in your startup scripts. Vern Hart doesn't like a pile of .qmail files in his home directory. So he uses users/assign to put them into a subdirectory: =vern:vern:2244:18:/home/vern::: +vern-:vern:2244:18:/home/vern:s/:: This puts .qmail in his home directory but everything else is in .qmails/. This changes ~/.qmail-foo to ~/.qmails/foo and really cleans up his home. Jim Simmons points out that you can stop linuxconf from creating a potential security hole by removing the /usr/sbin/sendmail line from /usr/lib/linuxconf/redhat/perm. If you don't do this, linuxconf will change /var/qmail/bin/sendmail to running suid. Dag Wieers wants to see all messages that are delivered to his domain but were bounced because the user or alias does not exist. Since you cannot forward and pipe in the same dot-qmail he found the following solution to be his most simple option, .qmail-default: |forward dag@mind.be >/dev/null 2>&1 |echo "Sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.1.1)"; exit 100 This way someone can simply check those mails regularly and forward them to the right person manually (which sometimes saves time when people are waiting for feedback) Peter van Dijk suggests that you have two services running smtpd, one using recordio and the other not. He says that it's a great diagnostic tool. Create /service/qmail-smtpd as you would normally. Create /service/qmail-smtpd-recordio as a copy with recordio inserted, and logging to a separate space (be sure to chmod this logdir tight because recordio records complete emails). Create /service/qmail-smtpd-recordio/down. The switchover is then simply: # svc -u /service/qmail-smtpd-recordio ; svc -d /var/service/qmail-smtpd and viceversa. Han Boetes blocks sites with no reverse dns. He uses the following tcp.smtp file. The only thing I would do differently is to set RBLSMTPD instead of just denying the connection. 127.0.0.1:allow,RELAYCLIENT="" 172.16.11.:allow,RELAYCLIENT="" =:allow :deny Japheth Cleaver has a simple solution for stunnel. using a wrapper script. Richard Lyons points out that multilog has filtering capabilities, see http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/multilog.html. If you leave recordio in place you can select what bits of the output to write. For example: multilog t '-* * > *' '-* * < *' /var/log/qmail/smtpd \ '-*' '+* * > 5*' /var/log/qmail/smtpd-err will do the normal logging to /var/log/qmail/smtpd, and will record 5xx errors sent by your server to the client in /var/log/qmail/smtpd-err. Qmail-popup redirects stderr to stdout, thus making it impossible to write a wrapper around qmail-pop3d which writes to the logfile by writing to stderr. Being a little cleverer with the shell, you can also redirect FD 7 onto stdout like this: /var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d-wrapper.sh /var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir 2>&1 7>&1 Once you've done that, qmail-pop3d-wrapper.sh can log to FD 7, like this: #!/bin/sh echo "qmail-pop3d: user $USER logged in from $TCPREMOTEIP:$TCPREMOTEPORT" >&7 $@ Alex Greg likes to see the output of svstat expressed in dhms instead of seconds. Erwin Hoffmann suggests a one-line fix to the errno compilation problem. It works for most DJB software: cat error.h | sed -es/^extern\ int\ errno\;/#include\ \<errno.h\>/ >error.h Or, djb suggests that you edit conf-cc to read: cc -O2 -include /usr/include/errno.h Russ Nelson suggests a method for stopping qmail reliably. When you need to stop qmail to do something, do it like this: svc -d /service/qmail-s* # wait for qmail-send to exit. setlock /service/qmail/supervise/lock sh -c ( # do stuff here svc -u /service/qmail-s* )

[index]

 

		Alternative Checkpassword Implementations
	qmail-popup and qmail-pop3d are glued together by a program called checkpassword. It's run by qmail-popup, reads the username and password handed to the POP3 daemon, looks them up in /etc/passwd, verifies them, switches to the username/home directory, and runs pop3d. At least that's what the standard one does. Some alternatives are listed below. Mark Delany has a clever way to test your checkpassword with a bit of command line re-direction. For example, with username fred, password bloggs, printf "%s\0%s\0%s\0" fred bloggs Y123456 | /bin/checkpassword id 3<&0 will execute /bin/id if the password is right. If you haven't a printf then enter the data into a file with your favourite binary editor, such as emacs, and then it's simply: /bin/checkpassword id 3<test.file Or use perl: perl -e 'printf "%s\0%s\0Y123456\0","fred","bloggs"' | ... Or use qmail-popup and use the 'user' and 'pass' commands: /var/qmail/bin/qmail-popup /bin/checkpassword id Jedi/Sector One has a checklocalpwd.c that checks a configuration file in addition to the users mentioned in /etc/passwd. Jos Backus has a mkpoppass/chkpoppass pair. It uses an alternate username/password file and is written in perl. Bruce Guenter has a virtual domain mail manager package called vmailmgr. It's designed to manage multiple domains of mail addresses and mailboxes on a single host. Co-operates with qmail for mail delivery and program control. Has corresponding add/deluser and change-passwd commands, and CGI scripts. Knows about shadow and MD5-encrypted passwords. Uses CDBs for the virtual domain tables. Supports IMAP via an authentication module for Courier-IMAP. Russell Nelson's pop-subaddr patch allows multiple maildirs per POP3 user, all of them authenticated with the same password. Alexey Mahotkin rewrote checkpassword-pam from scratch. Petr Novotny wrote an alternative to Russell Nelson's Open-SMTP patch for checkpassword. His code is a PAM module which calls external program to log $TCPREMOTEIP. It requires a PAM-enabled checkpassword or any POP3/IMAP system that uses PAM for authentication. Bruce Guenter has yet another SMTP relay control package. It uses a setuid program called from checkpassword to avoid patching checkpassword. Strictly speaking, it's not a patch, but it's here so people can find it along with the others. Christopher Johnson (EI39-1) wrote a virtual domains package with the following features. Inter7 is now maintaining the current version, called vpopmail. Dynamic delivery - no need to have dozens of .qmail files all over the place. Just a single .qmail-default handles all the deliveries Shadow password support - something that seemed to be lacking in the other programs Only takes up 1 entry in /etc/passwd - everything runs under a single UID/GID Decent documentation - actually, some docs I've come across for this are pretty good, but I had a bugger of a time getting the things working (probably 'cos I'm using shadow'd passwords on my own Linux box). Delivers direct to a Maildir for use with qmail-pop3d Ken Jones has a program for administration of virtual domains called QmailAdmin, using the vchkpw program. It handles pop acccounts, aliases, forwards, autorepsonder and ezmlm mailing list. Justin Hopper has a quota implementation for QmailAdmin. Steve Simitzis has XTND XMIT mods for qmail-pop3d that also incorporate some patches found on this site. André Oppermann has patches to do user lookup (deliver and retrieval via qmail-pop3) using LDAP. Cristiano Venturini has a site in Italian for qmail-ldap. Pedro Melo has a patch to checkpassword-0.81 which uses a CDB file. Chris Johnson wrote checkcdb, a version of checkpassword that authenticates users from a cdb database. It includes perl scripts to maintain the user database file. Shinya Ohira fixed a security lapse in checkpw, which gets its password from a file in the user's home directory, and allows both POP and APOP authentication. Magnus Bodin has a copy if that site happens to be unavailable. Tong has a PostgreSQL checkpassword. Matthias Andree has a patch to Dan's checkpassword that allows checkpasswd to use an arbitrary base directory for finding Maildirs Jesse Sweetland has added Postgres support to his checkpassword and qmail-getpw replacements. He calls the package sql-xpw. These differ from Takeshi's code because his is a patch to qmail and this code is not. Ariel Kirsman has written a checkpassword which authenticates using an NT domain. It is derived from code taken from squid. Andrew Richards has a checkpassword for Radius, written in C. It's based around Dan's checkpassword, and uses the Radius client library from FreeBSD, as well as MD5, since that's how Radius encodes its data. Larry M. Smith has a vanilla checkpassword.pl. Piotr Swebodzinski has a checkpassword for tru64 Unix. Scott Gifford has notes for using checkpassword w/ Courier-IMAP. Andrew Richards has a checkpassword that wraps around Courier-IMAP's authentication for use by qmail-pop3d. Andreas Aardal Hanssen has a way to run multiple checkpasswords and authenticate against one, and if that fails, then the other. If none succeed, it returns failure. David Phillips has a checkpassword which authenticates via a pop3 connection. While this may seem counter-productive, you can use it for smtp-auth where the smtp server does not have direct access to the user database. Plácido Revilla wrote a checkpassword that authentifies against a PHPNuke users database. This allows administrators of these kind of portals to automatize the creation of pop3 accounts in their system. Courierpasswd allows users to to check and change their passwords using Courier authentication modules. It can optionally read authentication tokens from stdin and send logging information to syslog or stderr. Adam Aube's chkpass.pl authenticates using a Squid auth helper program. Oliver Hitz authenticates against a CDB file and works for SMTP-AUTH as well as for Courier POP and IMAP. Tino Reichardt has a qpasswd checkpassword. Ted Fines wrote a perl LDAP checkpassword. Thomas Mangin's qmail-ldap-multi-auth patch allows you to run a mix of qmail-ldap and vmailmgr domains on the same machine. Cristiano Venturini has developed Qmailsuite to manage accounts of QMail Ldap Server written in Python (command line) and Php5 (web application).

[index]

 

		Yet More Qmail Addons
	Still need something more from qmail? The chances are good that you can find it here, contributed by users and supporters of qmail. Paul Fox has created a getpwnam() patch for qmail which causes it to use getpwname() to get the uids of its usernames. Evan Champion has a patch to condredirect. It allows condredirect to handle the case where the child has a permanent delivery error -- for example, when the program condredirect is asked to run doesn't exist. John Saunders has a patch to date822fmt.c which causes it to emit dates in the local timezone. Chuck Foster implemented code (which Bill Nugent updated it to qmail 1.03) to bind the local address for smtp client sessions to an address which is mapped using the remote address as a key. This can be useful to bypass a firewall, or if you've got split routing, or if you have a better non-publicized route to the destination host. Russell Nelson's qmail-popbull program lets you create bulletins which get added to a user's mailbox as they log in. Equivalent to an all-customers mailing list, but takes up much less resources, and lets you withdraw bulletins. Bruce Guenter has a qmail RPM which automatically applies a number of patches found here and which comes with some scripts. Markus Stumpf has a pair of qmail patches, one to cause qmail-smtpd to log its disposition of mail, and another to convince qmail-remote to use a fixed IP address other than the one you get without binding to an address. Andy Repton has ported the fixed IP address patch to qmail 1.03. Damir Cifer has better instructions for his port. Chuck Foster originally wrote a patch for tcpcontrol. That functionality got subsumed into tcpserver. John Levine has updated it to the current version (0.84). It allows you to: deny services based on domain names instead of IP addresses. distinguish between no PTR and wrong PTR DNS records. deny service to hosts whose forward and reverse DNS do not agree. Christopher K. Davis has a patch to accept oversize DNS packets which works on both qmail's dns.c and tcpserver's dns.c. If you don't want to patch qmail, you can ameliorate the problem somewhat using djbdns, which returns only the records you ask for, making for a smaller ANSWER section. Bruce Guenter has a patch which causes qmail programs to get their userids, not compiled in via auto_uids.c, but instead by looking at files in /var/qmail/owners. Bruce Guenter has RPMs of daemontools. Bruce Guenter wrote supervise-scripts, to help him start and stop supervise-managed programs in a more controlled manner. Nick Leverton wrote a patch to qmail-send to cause it to suspend remote delivery without needing to restart qmail. Ximenes Zalteca improved Dave's patch so that broken versions of Eudora which emit a CAPA command can still work with qmail's POP3 server. Fred Lindberg has a patch which causes qmail-send to preserving the MIME-ness when bouncing MIME messages. It requires and includes a patch to ezmlm, since it breaks QSBMF. Jose Luis Painceira's patch deletes the body on big bouncing messages. It's based on Fred Lindberg's patch (see previous item). Note that if you use ezmlm, you may need Fred's patch for ezmlm-return, which is not included here. Klaus-Uwe R. Ittner wrote a patch to make serialmail enclose the bounced message as a MIME part, in analogy with qmail-mime.tar.gz. Useful for all those unfortunate people who use character sets other than us-ascii and want to be able to decipher what bounced. There's also the qmail-verh patch. This allows substitution of the recipient local/host parts into the message. Useful for inserting a customized mailto: URL for list-unsubscribe into the body of the message. Bernhard Graf has a fix for input buffer boundary problems. Mrs. Brisby has written a user/password based authentication mechanism for qmail-smtpd. This lets your microsoft's outlook express supports (outgoing mail server user name) and netscape 4.5 (and above-betas) users securely roam. Users can use a slightly modified version of their own checkpassword.c program as outlined in my own vchkpw.c that I use. Also, two very simple perl scripts to perform pop3-based authentication for qmail. Krzysztof Dabrowski has made some improvements to Mrs. Brisby's SMTP-AUTH, to let it work with CRAM-MD5 and PLAIN. Traian Zvirid has additional restrictions on top of Krzysztof's SMTP-AUTH patch. Eric M. Johnston's YAQSAP (Yet Another qmail SMTP AUTH Patch). Frederik Vermeulen has written a patch implementing RFC2487 (starttls) in qmail (qmail-smtpd as server, qmail-remote as client). This means you can get SSL or TLS encrypted and authenticated SMTP between the MTAs and between MTA and an MUA like Netscape4.5. Oliver Hitz wrote a small tool to manually test SMTP-AUTH CRAM-MD5 authentication. Petri Kaukasoina wrote a little shared library which should help qmail reliability on Linux. Linux does not automagically fsync metadata (information necessary tomake a file appear in the filesystem). It only fsyncs metadata when the the directory is fsynced. Bruce Guenter's syncdir gives qmail bsd fsync semantics on a Linux filesystem. Scott Moorhouse rewrote a patch (which someone had written earlier and which I failed to publish here) to work around a Netscape bug, the symptoms of which are that it does not know how big a message is, so Netscape's download indicator doesn't progress. Frank DENIS wrote a patch to truncate bounce messages (local copy, by author's request), on the off chance that the user may have kept a copy of the email. takeshi@SoftAgency.co.jp wrote MySQL + QMAIL, including qmail-getpw-mysql and checkpassword-mysql, to look up users in a mysql database. Iain Patterson has improved on MySQL + QMAIL. Also see sql-gpw and sql-cpw. Michael Devogelaere's qmail-sql now includes ODBC support. The prolific Bruce Guenter has written qmail-qfilter, which is a front end for qmail-queue that can send the body of the message through one or more filters, such as qmail-inject or new-inject. Matthias Andree has a patch to allow qmail's sendmail wrapper to ignore the -N dsn option that sendmail has, for compatibility with MUAs that use the -N dsn switch (mutt can do) Russ Nelson updated his changes to qmail-remote to send using QMTP. If you wish to receive mail via qmtp, run qmtpd. Gerrit Pape has Debian packages. Klaus Reimer has code to change the appearance of bounce messages. Note that this has the potential to break QSBMF. Scott Woods has qmail running on a Cray. It took some patching to make it run on UNICOS, but it's running. Scott Gifford's moreipme patch is available. This solves the problem seen when a host has more IP addresses than it knows about. This happens in particular when you have an IP masquerading load balancer in front of a host. Mark Delaney noted that he was getting spam with a null envelope sender. That by itself is insufficient reason to reject the email. However, when the spam has multiple envelope recipients, it cannot be a bounce message. So, Charles Cazabon wrote a patch to enforce single recipients on bounces. André Oppermann updated his ext-todo patch, which solves the 'silly qmail syndrome'. That's where qmail spends more time processing incoming email than scheduling deliveries. You can get it with big-todo integrated as big-ext-todo. Dr. Erwin Hoffmann has written his own SMTP Auth package. Bjoern Kalkbrenner has improved the smtp-auth client patch (alternate location) so it works with multiple users. This is of most use for a desktop qmail installation which needs to relay mail through a server that requires authentication. The original author was Jay Soffian (documentation, patch). Last person to touch that patch was Robert Sanders Giacomo Cariello used to have OpenBSD Qmail Ports. Adrian Ho has increased qmail-remote's compliance with RFC2821. Some smtp servers are now emitting 5XX responses from the get-go, and mere RFC821 behavior doesn't deal well with them. James Raftery wants the canonicalized hostname in the logfile, so he can see the real envelope recipients of messages after host name canonicalization. If you send a mail to me at lecter@www.redbroock.dcu.ie, your logs will show 'to remote lecter@www.redbrook.dcu.ie' but qmail-remote will actually use 'lecter@prodigy.redbrook.dcu.ie' in the RCPT TO command. Miguel Beccari has QmailToaster RPM packages. Features: Mail Server (pop3, pop3-ssl, imap4, imap-ssl, smtp, smtp-ssl), Web Administration Tools (vpopmail, vqadmin), Web Mail Client (horde), Mailing lists(ezmlm), Autoresponder, Antispam. Ingo Rohloff has added SMTP authentication support to serialsmtp.. Jan Knepper has a qmail virtual domain outgoing IP address patch, based on IP adddress. Alberto Brealey-Guzman also has an outgoing IP address patch, but his uses a control file to do the mapping. Will Harris has a patch to make qmail fully RFC 1870 compliant, i.e. to support the ESMTP SIZE command. Erwin Hoffman has some corrections. Andreas Mueller has compiled qmail for HP-UX. J. de Boyne Pollard suggests that you remove the bodge that works around a BIND version 4 problem David Phillips noticed that qmail's sendmail's -f emulation doesn't set the default for the username as sendmail does. Insist that your local users use only certain domain names on their outgoing email. Balazs Nagy has a concurrent IP connection limiter for ucspi-tcp. Tomislav Randjic has ported that patch to both ucspi-ssl and ucspi-tls. Joshua Megerman wrote a patch to implement hashed per-IP connection limiting in qmail-send and qmail-remote. Matthew Trout checks SMTP clients to see if they are open relays before he will accept email from them. John R Levine has written a SMTP AUTH patch for ofmipd in mess822-0.58. Various people have created patches centered around the SMTP conversation's MAIL FROM: and RCPT TO: verbs. Johan Almqvist logs badmailfrom hits. Ward Vandewege wrote a patch to implement badrcptto, in the same vein as badmailfrom. John Levine wrote a badrcptto patch which uses CDB and logging. Oliver Neubauer has a validrcptto patch, which rejects invalid addresses in the SMTP dialog. Note that you cannot use this if you have any .qmail files ending in -default, e.g. any ezmlm lists. Dion Sasmito wrote a goodmailfrom matching badmailfrom's functionality. Paul Jarc's realrcptto patch changes qmail-smtpd so it uses the same tests as qmail-send to choose a .qmail file. The email might still be bounced by the .qmail file, but if it would bounce because there is no applicable .qmail file, then the email is rejected in the smtp dialog. Thomas Mangin's qmail-remote-user-verification patch performs user verification against both qmail-ldap and vmailmgr to bounce mail. It does not bounce mail during conversation but at qmail-queue (changing this is trivial tho), so it will not save you bandwidth but only cpu if you scan emails. Andrew Richards has modified Paul Jarc's realrcptto into qmail-verify. It now uses UDP for privilege separation which also allows an incoming mail server to query a separate mailstore for larger installations. John Simpson has a validrcptto.cdb patch. Frederik Vermeulen got tired of his users sending oversize attachments, so he wrote an experimental patch that provides a qmail-queue replacement that detaches large attachments from an email and replaces them by an URL where the attached files can be downloaded (to avoid large attachments being sent over the internet via email). Lukas Feiler has merged several patches into his bigqmail patch. netqmail-1.05-tls-smtpauth-20060105.patch validrcptto.cdb patch big-concurrency.patch doublebounce-trim.patch big-ext-todo (EXTTODO patch & big-todo patch) Alberto Brealey-Guzman's outgoingips patch Christopher K. Davis' DNS patch John Simpson's combined patch. Kazinori Fujiwara has an IPv6 patch Animesh Bansriyar needed to limit some users to receiving only local email

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		Microsoft virus prevention
	Microsoft products are susceptible to a large variety of viruses, worms, and other fauna. The best solution is to not use them. A secondary solution is to use anti-virus software to keep viruses away from Microsoft products. Jason Haar wrote Qmail-Scanner (also known as scan4virus), which scans all gatewayed Email for certain characteristics. It is typically used for its anti-virus protection functions, in which case it is used in conjunction with commercial virus scanners. but also enables a site to react to Email (at a server/site level) that contains specific strings in particular headers, or particular attachment filenames or types (e.g. *.VBS attachments). AMaViS is A Mail Virus Scanner. Kaspersky Lab includes qmail support for their AVP anti-virus program. Jozef Hitzinger wrote "How to filter ms e-mail worms". OdeiaVir integrates virus scanning into qmail. Central Command's Vexira Antivirus For Mail Servers(aka VAMS+I for the Integrated version) has qmail support. Russell Nelson has an antivirus patch for qmail-smtpd, with some contributions from Charles Cazabon. F-Prot supports use of the Anomy sanitizer with qmail. Paul Gregg rejects HELO commands whose parameter has no dot. Adam Aube's block_file.pl rejects messages using file name and/or MIME type patterns. qscanq, by Len Budney. Qscanq provides a virus-scanning wrapper for qmail. Qscanq scans every email message submitted to qmail before allowing it to be added to qmail's mail queue. Infected emails are rejected, not bounced, so you won't have to deal with double-bounces during virus outbreaks. BitDefender antivirus/antispam for qmail

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		Patches for high-volume servers
	Dave Smith of XOOM.com has updated Russell Nelson's big-todo patch for qmail 1.03. Bruce Guenter added a fix for qmail-qstat. Big-todo is only useful if you need to inject email into the queue when qmail-send is not running. This is not the usual case. Johannes Erdfelt of S.u.S.E wrote a patch to allow qmail to use a concurrency greater than 240. If your queue gets larger than about 23,000 separate messages you'll need to change conf-split and recompile. Different Unix filesystems will affect that 23,000 figure, but not by more than a factor of two. This will ruin your queue, however. The best way to make this change is to run two copies of qmail like this: stop qmail. rename /var/qmail to /var/qmail2. change conf-qmail to /var/qmail2. make setup. change conf-split to a prime number which reflects your requirements. change conf-qmail back to /var/qmail make setup. restart qmail run /var/qmail2/rc. In a week you'll be deleting this copy, so don't worry about setting it up under daemontools. Russ Nelson discards doublebounces without queuing them with his doublebounce-trim patch. Pawel Foremski has a qmail-smtpd plugin system. Nikola Vladov has devised a way to link qmail against djbdns's resolver library. Thomas Mangin's vmailmgr proxy allows vmailmgr-tcp users to use multiple backend transparently.

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		Anti-spam techniques and code
	Chris Hardie has updated his qmail anti-spam howto. Dan's rblsmtpd blocks spam using the RBL and other DNS-based lists. Because of the size of the RSS zone, they have removed the necessary TXT records that rblsmtpd relies on. Alan Curry has a patch to rblsmtpd to make it work with A records. David Jonas has a patch to rblsmtpd to let you ignore certain A record responses from the bl lookup. Russell Nelson has a pair of programs to help keep spam out of your mailbox. Jason R. Mastaler has improved TMDA, an anti-spam system. Lionel Widdifield wrote an anti-spam patch. Someone made some improvements to Lionel's patch, which Lindsay Haisley has ported to qmail 1.03. qregex provides full regexp matching on envelope addresses.With REs (Regular Expresions) it becomes quite easy to filter out email addresses that contain invalid characters or simply aren't a real address. Andrew St. Jean has added case insensitive pattern matching and logging when a match is found. Chris Johnson has a patch to implement tarpitting in qmail-smtpd. If you don't know what tarpitting is, it's the practice of inserting a small sleep in an SMTP session for each RCPT TO after some set number of RCPT TOs. The idea is to thwart spammers who would hand your SMTP server a single message with a long list of RCPT TOs. Nagy Balazs wrote a patch to ensure that the domain name on the envelope sender is a valid DNS name. This is not terribly effective against spammers, but I list it here because some people want it. Jon Rust wrote qrblcheck, which reads a message on stdin, grabs the IP address from the Received lines and checks it against five different DNS-based spamlists. Jay Soffian has a qmail-queue replacement to filter against DNS spamlists.. It uses Bruce Guenter's QMAILQUEUE patch. Matching email is not rejected, but instead an X-RBL: header is added, for filtering at the delivery layer. O'Shaughnessy Evans has a set of shell scripts that comprise a spam-filtering system called "spamrule". Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote qpsmtpd, a smtp server with filtering tools. It's written in perl. Rolf Eike Beer has implemented replacements for qmail-smtpd and qmail-remote which add features like IPv6, STARTTLS, AUTH, CHUNKING, and PIPELINING. Erwin Hoffman's SPAMCONTROL combines many spam control features. Includes SMTP Auth with CRAM-MD5 support. EnderUNIX Team wrote spamGuard, which scans your log files for "too much" email from a particular user, and adds them to badmailfrom. Russell Nelson has a patch to reject relay probes generated by so-called anti-spammers. These relay probes have '!', '%' and '@' in the local (username) part of the address. Dale Woolridge, James Law, and Moto Kawasaki's spam throttle patch provides a method to rate limit/stutter spam (message throughput) via a highly parameterized control interface. As of release 2.01, tcpserver is no longer a strict requirement. James Grinter has instructions on using SpamAssassin. It's a script that runs from a .qmail file. Chris Kennedy has written the BlackHole spam/virus filter. Noel Mistula wrote checkhab, which checks for HTML, attachments, and binaries in email, and blocks them. Gerrit Pape wrote qconfirm, a delivery confirmation process for a mail address. Chris Johnson wrote qdated to create and verify timestamped e-mail addresses. These addresses expire after a user-configurable period of time; any mail sent to an expired address will bounce. Roger Merchberger has some techniques to deal with double-bouncing email. q-sorter sorts your email into separate inboxes. Net::QMTP - This perl module implements an object oriented interface to a Quick Mail Transfer Protocol (QMTP) client which enables a perl program to send email by QMTP. Georg Lehner tells how to configure Qmail with Spamassassin. Jeffrey Clement wrote a time-limited email-address program called datedmail. Luca Morettoni wrote qmail-rblchk, which checks the IP address in the Received: line of an email message on stdin against named DNSBLs. Jean-Eudes ONFRAY wrote a rhsbl patch for tcpserver. This lets you block or whitelist email based on the reverse-DNS hostname rather than IP. Philip Gladstone wrote a delivery-time SPF checker. More on SPF. Christophe Saout wrote a SPF checker that runs inside qmail-smtpd and is written using the native dns and string functions that come with qmail. Marcelo Coelho has written a patch for SRS. More info on SRS. SRS and SPF work together. Markus Stumpf has a patch for qmail-smtpd that rejects W32/Sober-G at the SMTP level. Jay Soffian has modified qmail-smtpd to fork/exec $RCPTCHECK at the RCPT TO:. $RCPTCHECK is run in the same environment as qmail-smtpd. Additionally $SENDER is set to the envelope from and $RECIPIENT is set to the envelope recipient (for the current rcpt to:). Based on the return code (exit value) of $RCPTCHECK, the rcpt to: address will either be accepted or rejected. Niek Baakman has made a small page regarding recipient checking if qmail is in front of a exchange server. Thomas Mangin has a greylisting solution in Python. Jon Lewis has an SMTP banner delay program. This causes SMTP clients which give up early, or start pipelining too soon, to have their connections rejected. Typically these clients are sources of spam. Russ Nelson wrote the selfhelo patch, which causes qmail-smtpd to reject email sent using a HELO hostname equal to your IP address, your hostname, or any hostname without dots. Sam Clippinger has written a filter for qmail that blocks spam at connection-time, called spamdyke It's similar to DJB's rblsmtpd but it provides a lot more features than rblsmtpd, including blacklisting, graylisting, limiting numbers of recipients, checking rDNS entries, checking DNS RBLs, vastly superior logging and more. spamdyke supports SMTP AUTH and TLS, and will even provide SMTP AUTH to unpatched qmail installations! Recompiling qmail is not necessary to use spamdyke. Andrew Richards has written NORCPTHOSTS, which mandates authentication for relaying hosts. The sender must authenticate before sending _any_ mail (including to rcpthosts listed domains), regardless of the content of control/rcpthosts[.cdb]. It's enabled by an environment variable. Jan Mojzis uses the postgrey daemon. Andrew Richards traps early talkers in the SMTP dialog. Building on the work of Erwin Hoffmann and John Simpson, Andrew has a patch to netqmail-1.06 (with qmail-errmsg logging patch) to catch and disconnect connections that try to send SMTP commands before the SMTP greeting has been issued by the server.

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		Qmail books
	John Levine has written the O'Reilly & Associates "owl" book on qmail (owls eat bats). More information on the book is available on John's page. Dave Sill has written The qmail Handbook. You can buy it at Amazon. Erwin Hoffmann is writing a book in German on qmail, called Qmail&co. Unfortunately, the book has been cancelled by the publisher. Samuel Prakoso and Tomy and Onno Purbo have written a qmail book in Indonesian. Florian Schiessl points out his Qmail, vpopmail, qmailadmin, ... Howto for Debian woody. Ricardo Oliveira and Mario Gamito have written a qmail book in Portuguese entitled "Como instalar um servidor completo de email". Baris Simsek, Ismail Yenigul and Huzeyfe Onal have written a new Qmail Book in Turkish. Rodrigo P. Telles has written Qmail - Guia de consulta. It is available online under a Creative Commons License. Krzysztof Marciniak has written a qmail book in Polish entitled "qmail. Szybki i wydajny serwer pocztowy". Felipe Costa has written a book for qmail in Brazil-Portuguese.

[index]

 

		Recommended patches
	The definitions of errno in qmail (and tcpserver) do not work with the newest glibc (2.3.1). Debian and redhat are updating to this glibc. Executables compiled with older glibc's (2.3) abort on startup, and recompilation with 2.3.1 is not possible. Mate Wierdl has patches for all of djb's software. Erwin Hoffmann points out that a one-line sed script will fix most of DJB's software. Look in the Tips section. Erik Sjölund pointed out this bug in qmail-local. qmail ought to recognize 0.0.0.0 as a local IP address. This patch from Scott Gifford implements that change. David Phillips noticed that sendmail's -f option sets a default From: header, and so should qmail's emulation. Bruce Guenter has written a patch which causes any program that would run qmail-queue to look for an environment variable QMAILQUEUE. If it is present, it is used in place of the string "bin/qmail-queue" when running qmail-queue. This could be used, for example, to add a program into the qmail-smtpd->qmail-queue pipeline that could do filtering, rewrite broken headers, etc.

Send kudos/brickbats/contributions to Russell Nelson. Some design contributed by Steve Cole and Olivier Mueller. Some lint'ing by Paul Theodoropoulos.