> if qmail is no good can anybody recommend something that actually
> works properly.
That attitude will get you a long way on this list.
qmail works properly. If you follow the completely straightforward
installation documents that come with the tarball, or follow Dave Sill's
excellent "Life with qmail," you too can have a working qmail installation,
just like thousands of others have before you. If your attitude is that any
failure on your part to understand qmail right off the bat is a shortcoming
of qmail, rather than a shortcoming of Howard Miller, then you might as well
look elsewhere for an MTA.
You may want to look at http://web.infoave.net/~dsill/lwq.html#trigger . If
that's not your problem, you might consider looking at the log files, which
hold the answers to many of these mysteries.
Chris