Re: Program Delivery to PHP Script
On Sun, 29 Jul 2001, PHP Webmaster wrote: LYNX METHOD === So for the lynx method, I tried in the .qmail file: |/usr/bin/lynx -post_data http://..parser.php; However, I keep getting the error in my qmail log: deferral: Your terminal lacks the ability to clear the screen_or_position_the_cursor./_/ Perhaps there is an option that can tell lynx not to expect a terminal. How about lynx -post_data -source? Note that I'm just guessing here. I've never actually used lynx in non-interactive mode. But if I remember correctly, -source is how to do it (that's how the CPAN shell uses lynx to download a file from the web). I am currently running PHP as an apache module, so I don't seem to have an executable on the system. I am concerned if I install the CGI version of PHP which is an executable, would that interfere with the PHP module in apache? No, it won't interfere as long as you don't specify --with-apxs or another option that makes it integrate itself with Apache. ./configure --with-mysql=/usr --with-apxs=/etc/httpd/bin/apxs --with-curl=/usr/local/lib So try ./configure --with-mysql=/usr --with-curl=/usr/local/lib Also, I am using qmail-inject instead of the standard sendmail for PHP's mail() function. As a result, I need to update the php.ini file. How would I do that if I only copy the php executable to another directory? would I also have to copy the php.ini file? Well, after you've compiled the php executable, type this: php info.html ?phpinfo();? Then press Ctrl+D and it will dump the output of phpinfo() to info.html. Look in info.html to see the path name where it expects php.ini to be (search for php.ini using your browser's find function), and make sure you have php.ini there.
Re: Mail Forwarding Service
On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, Adrian Ho wrote: Why use a program delivery when you can use .qmail forward directives? man dot-qmail for details, and create the necessary .qmail files (probably .qmail-youralias in the same directory you put your domain's .qmail-default). Well, there's over 10,000 e-mail addresses that would have to be forwarded. Wouldn't I have to create a .qmail-name file for everyone in the MySQL database (would there be a filesystem efficiency issue when I have 10,000 files in the directory?), and also keep these files synchronized with inserts, updates and deletes done to the MySQL database? I figure that it's cleaner, programming-wise, to just lookup the MySQL database at the time a message is received rather than having to worry about synchronization. But this lookup script has increased the load average of the server above 10.
[OT] Is namezero.com's mail server broken?
When I send message to this mailing list, I keep getting the following bounce message from namezero.com's mail server. Apparently, someone who's e-mail address is a namezero domain that forwards to a Yahoo account is causing these bounce messages. Shouldn't the bounce have gone to qmail-return*@list.cr.yp.to instead of me? Is namezero's mail server sending bounces to the From address instead of the envelope sender? -- Forwarded message -- Return-Path: Received: from mail-out.namezero.com (mail-out.namezero.com [216.34.13.235]) by sg1.indexthis.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id CAA01874 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sat, 28 Jul 2001 02:50:18 -0400 Received: from root by mail-out.namezero.com with local (Exim 3.30 #2) id 15QNwH-00028W-00 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Fri, 27 Jul 2001 23:51:05 -0700 X-Failed-Recipients: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Mail Delivery System [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender Message-Id: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 23:51:05 -0700 This message was created automatically by mail delivery software (Exim). A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data: host mx1.mail.yahoo.com [216.136.129.4]: 554 delivery error: dd Sorry, your message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] cannot be delivered. This account is over quota. - mta579.mail.yahoo.com -- This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. -- Return-path: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: from lavender.backend.namezero.com ([10.0.0.3] helo=lavender) by mail-out.namezero.com with esmtp (Exim 3.30 #2) id 15QNwH-00028U-00 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Fri, 27 Jul 2001 23:51:05 -0700 Received: from muncher.math.uic.edu (HELO muncher.math.uic.edu) (131.193.178.181/131.193.178.181) by lavender with SMTP; Fri, 27 Jul 2001 23:51:05 -0700 (PDT) Apparently from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On behalf of: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: (qmail 27502 invoked by uid 1002); 28 Jul 2001 06:46:55 - Mailing-List: contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: (qmail 5477 invoked from network); 28 Jul 2001 06:46:55 - Received: from sg1.indexthis.net (66.33.60.115) by muncher.math.uic.edu with SMTP; 28 Jul 2001 06:46:55 - Received: from localhost (pmak@localhost) by sg1.indexthis.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id CAA00835; Sat, 28 Jul 2001 02:44:45 -0400 Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 02:44:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Philip Mak [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Adrian Ho [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mail Forwarding Service In-Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-NZ-Hop-Count: 1 On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, Adrian Ho wrote: Why use a program delivery when you can use .qmail forward directives? man dot-qmail for details, and create the necessary .qmail files (probably .qmail-youralias in the same directory you put your domain's .qmail-default). Well, there's over 10,000 e-mail addresses that would have to be forwarded. Wouldn't I have to create a .qmail-name file for everyone in the MySQL database (would there be a filesystem efficiency issue when I have 10,000 files in the directory?), and also keep these files synchronized with inserts, updates and deletes done to the MySQL database? I figure that it's cleaner, programming-wise, to just lookup the MySQL database at the time a message is received rather than having to worry about synchronization. But this lookup script has increased the load average of the server above 10.
Fastforward question (was Re: Mail Forwarding Service)
On 28 Jul 2001, Frank D. Cringle wrote: Use fastforward - http://cr.yp.to/fastforward.html Periodically dump the relevant parts of your MySQL database into the cdb that fastforward uses. Hmm, looks like it could work. The Speed tests section of http://cr.yp.to/fastforward.html says that it takes only 6 seconds to regenerate an alias db with 5 entries. I could run a cron job every two hours to regenerate the cdb. My question about fastforward is: Will my existing .qmail-* files stop working? If so, how can I make the ezmlm aliases still work? e.g. one of my .qmail files for posting to an announcement list says: |egrep -i ^From:.*([EMAIL PROTECTED]) || (echo Permission denied.; exit 100) |/usr/local/bin/ezmlm/ezmlm-reject |/usr/local/bin/ezmlm/ezmlm-send '/home/ptscb/lists/buildreferrals' |/usr/local/bin/ezmlm/ezmlm-warn '/home/ptscb/lists/buildreferrals' || exit 0 I don't think this would work in /etc/aliases, which is supposed to be one entry per line.
Re: qmail-queue and custom reject message
On Sat, 28 Jul 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i wrote custom script which substitute qmail-queue, it unpack received message, starting antivirus and if message infected anyone, return code '111' i.e. temporary problem, and deny message relay via server. but, user cannot understand reason of relay-deny. so, server must return custom error message to sender. how i can made it? Print the error message to standard output and the server will return this message.
Re: Fastforward question (was Re: Mail Forwarding Service)
On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, Adrian Ho wrote: Hmm, looks like it could work. The Speed tests section of http://cr.yp.to/fastforward.html says that it takes only 6 seconds to regenerate an alias db with 5 entries. I could run a cron job every two hours to regenerate the cdb. I'd be more worried about speed of delivery than speed of DB regeneration. Note that it's still a program delivery, albeit done through a more efficient program than your existing perlDB script. Oh, I see now; fastforward is a program that I specify to be called in .qmail-default. I thought it was a patch to be applied to qmail. So it would still have the overhead of having to read a message from qmail, and then write that message back to qmail. That overhead would be unavoidable if I'm doing program delivery, I guess. I wonder if in the future, they'll make an alias delivery option in qmail; that is, it calls an external program, but instead of sending the entire message to the program, it just sends the RCPT TO: address to the program and the program returns to it which mailbox(es) should be delivered to. Then again, this could turn out to be an ugly piece of 'feature creep'.
Re: Fastforward question (was Re: Mail Forwarding Service)
On 28 Jul 2001, MarkD wrote: To answer Philip's question: Yes, that overhead is un[avoidable] as there is no standard qmail solution for redirecting mail without it going thru the queue at least once. Having said that your concern about overhead may be misplaced. What sort of volume are you expecting on what sort of system? 24000 total users on a Pentium III 850MHz with 768 MB of RAM (not sure how many are active though...at least a couple thousand). I currently use .qmail-default to run a perl script which connects to a MySQL database, performs a lookup on the alias, then opens a pipe to sendmail to deliver the message. Upon activating this system, the load average of the machine has increased from 1-2 to 10! I suspect most of the time is being spent compiling the perl script and connecting to the MySQL database, though. If I switch to fastforward (or if I rewrite the script in C, and use a persistent database connection handle somehow, maybe by storing it in an flock'd file) maybe the load average will drop back down to normal.
Re: Fastforward question (was Re: Mail Forwarding Service)
On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, Adrian Ho wrote: Unless the destination address happens to be in a virtual domain on the same machine, in which case the standard reinjection actually trumps the above by one unneeded SMTP transaction from the machine to itself. In any case, it sounds to me like we're entering the realm of pinhole optimization (or some equivalent concept). Is the performance boost worth the kinks it'll likely introduce in the existing qmail architecture? I'm not sure... Is it really that complicated to get the forwarding alias from a program? I'm thinking---at the moment when qmail is reading the .qmail-default file, it can encounter: [EMAIL PROTECTED] At this point, it has the capability of specifying a local or remote e-mail address to forward the message to. Doesn't it? So it should also be able to easily run an external program at this point to determine the e-mail address to forward to. I am not familiar with the internals of qmail, but from what I have seen, this would make sense.
Re: Fastforward question (was Re: Mail Forwarding Service)
On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, Peter van Dijk wrote: I am not familiar with the internals of qmail, but from what I have seen, this would make sense. Yes. This program could then just talk to /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue itself, or talk to /var/qmail/bin/forward. Oh, so you're saying if e.g. on mydomain.com I have the file .qmail-pmak that says: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and someone sends e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], the message actually gets injected twice into qmail---first time to send to [EMAIL PROTECTED], then qmail re-injects it again for delivery to [EMAIL PROTECTED]?
Re: Program Delivery to PHP Script
On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, PHP Webmaster wrote: the .qmail makes a program delivery to a PHP script at http://www.mydomain.com/parser.php which then stores the message in a database. The PHP installation is as an Apache module so I think I might have to use Lynx. So here is something I've come up with: |/usr/bin/lynx -source http://mydomain.com/parser.php; That won't work exactly as is, since you need lynx to send the contents of standard input to the PHP script as POST data. man lynx shows the following option: -post_data send form data from stdin using POST method and dump results. So try putting -post_data in the lynx command. A more correct way of doing this would be to run php from the command line. Try typing locate php | grep /php$ to see if a PHP executable is available on your system. If not, you can compile one by downloading PHP from php.net, doing ./configure (don't include any options in ./configure), then make (don't do make install), and just copy the php executable that it creates to whereever you need it. If you go with the PHP executable, you would put in your .qmail file: |/path/to/php -q /path/to/script.php (-q tells it not to send HTML headers.)
Forwarding Problem: Solved!
I found out two things: (1) compiling a perl script every time an e-mail message arrives is quite inefficient, but connecting to the database is okay (2) I had a mail infinite loop #1 was fixed by rewriting my .qmail-default script in C instead of perl. It does almost exactly the same thing, except: #2 was fixed by calling /var/qmail/bin/forward instead of /usr/bin/sendmail to forward the message. forward adds a Delivered-To: header that does mail loop checking, while sendmail doesn't. It turns out that I had [EMAIL PROTECTED] who had set his e-mail address forward to baduser, so it kept looping back to himself. I did have a check in my perl script not to forward to anything @mydomain.com, but I didn't check for e-mail addresses that had no @ sign! So, the perl script wasn't really responsible for jacking my system load average up to 10; the baduser was. Upon disabling the baduser's forward, the load average with the perl script went down to 1.5. The load average with the C script is 0.10. Yay! ^___^
Mail Forwarding Service
Hello, I am using qmail to run a mail forwarding service. When the mail server receives a message at [EMAIL PROTECTED], it looks up the alias in a MySQL database and forwards the message to an e-mail address given in the MySQL database. I am accomplishing this by putting in my .qmail-default file for that domain: |/home/brc/bin/forward where /home/brc/bin/forward is a perl script which: 1. connects to the MySQL database 2. looks up the database to determine which address to forward to 3. opens a pipe to /usr/sbin/sendmail (taking care to use exec so that special characters aren't interpreted by the shell) to deliver the message to the recipient This seems to be too inefficient though. We have thousands of active members; since I implemented this script, our machine's load average is up from 1 or 2 to 10!! Looking at top, I usee the forward process running a lot (remember it has to be called every time someone @mydomain.com receives a message). Does anyone have suggestions on how to make this more efficient? Can I open a persistent database connection to MySQL somehow? And is there a better way to pass the message on than opening a pipe to /usr/sbin/sendmail? Should I rewrite the perl script in C perhaps?
Two qmail servers communicating
I have a setup with two qmail servers on different machines (call them machine 1 and machine 2). Machine 1's qmail has to send all its mail to machine 2's qmail, which delivers the messages to their final destination. If machine 1 is disconnected from the network, its qmail has to hold the messages until it can establish contact with machine 2. My question is: Should I use normal SMTP for the two qmails to communicate, or should I use QMQP or QMTP? (If it's the latter two, how do I do it?) -Philip Mak ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
I'm not root, can I use qmail?
Hello, I have a unique problem that doesn't seem to be covered by the documentation. I have a shell account on a system (not root). I would like to setup qmail as an SMTP server on port 2525. It would only be used for outgoing mail, not incoming mail. Does anyone know how I might go about implementing this? Can qmail be run in a daemon mode to listen to port 2525, instead of being started by /etc/inetd.conf? I know some C, so I'm able to perform minor hacks on the source code if necessary. -Philip Mak ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
RE: I'm not root, can I use qmail?
On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Tanuj Shah wrote: I would have thought, just install qmail somewhere in your home and use tcpserver for the listening on port 2525. Thanks; you solved part of the puzzle for me. On a test system where I have root access, I was able to run qmail as a send-only SMTP server on port 2525 using tcpserver. I can't get it to run on the system where I need it (and don't have root), though. qMail is hardwired to install into /var/qmail, and there seems to be no clean way of changing that. I managed to hack the Makefile so that when I did make setup check, it went into $HOME/var/qmail instead, but I think I did something wrong, because when I execute this command: csh -cf '$HOME/var/qmail/rc ' it does not start up the qmail-send, qmail-lspawn etc. processes. If I had root and qmail refused to start, I could read /var/log/messages, but as a normal user I can't read that file to see what the problem is. Does anyone have any ideas? (Is there a way to get it to print the errors to a file that I can read?) On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Csaba Bobak wrote: In general, it is a strange idea to set up a mail gateway without notifying the root (even if it is for outgoing mails only). Your netadmin will set it up for you if it is really important. My account is on a commercial webhost. They allow us to run daemons in the background, but if I asked them to set it up for me it would be expensive. -Philip Mak ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: I'm not root, can I use qmail?
On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Chris Johnson wrote: What is a send-only SMTP server? qmail-smtpd receives mail from the Internet and queues it; it doesn't send mail anywhere. By send-only, I mean that this SMTP server is not intended for receiving e-mail to be delivered to local users. It will only be used by Listar (a mailing list manager) to send out e-mail. I do have sendmail installed on the system, but sendmail doesn't handle massive mailing lists (this one has 3000 users) that efficiently. Edit conf-qmail. Ahh, so that's the correct way to change the installation directory... You'll never be able to install and run qmail without root access because it requires installing qmail-queue setuid, and it requires running various other programs as users other than yourself. As a regular, non-root user, you can't create a setuid program and you can't run programs as other users. Hmm... would it be feasible for me to comment out all the code in the program that changes its user id? For what I want to do, I don't need any special privileges; the only thing I need qmail to do is to relay mail to remote SMTP servers. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? I am trying to setup qmail to send out messages for Listar. When Listar sends it a message, its job is to relay that message to the remote SMTP servers of the recipients. That's all. -Philip Mak ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: RELAYCLIENT
Erik Logan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: /etc/tcp.smtp: MY_IP:allow,RELAYCLIENT= :allow [...] But I am still getting the 553 error. Any suggetions on something I missed in the FAQ? I did the same procedure earlier today and it worked fine for me. The only thing I can think of is that you entered your IP address incorrectly somehow. Are you trying to use it from localhost? If so, add these lines to your /etc/tcp.smtp file: 192.168.10.:allow,RELAYCLIENT= 127.0.0.1:allow,RELAYCLIENT= then rerun tcprules /etc/tcp.smtp.cbd /etc/tcp.smtp.tmp /etc/tcp.smtp and it should work (putting the IP address of localhost doesn't seem to necessarily work). -Philip Mak ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: RELAYCLIENT
On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Erik Logan wrote: The real tcp.smtp file says: 66.12.153.158:allow,RELAYCLIENT= dsl.gtei.net:allow,RELAYCLIENT= :allow this is what I am trying right now with no success dsl.gtei.net is an invalid host. Did you mean dsl.gte.net perhaps? Take a look at your mail log file (on my system it's /var/log/maillog) and see what IP address qmail is recognizing the remote host as (just look for any IP addresses in the log). See if that matches with what you put in /etc/tcp.smtp. -Philip Mak ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Running as non-root: How to do it
Well, I figured out how to run qmail as a non-root user. I am posting my experiences here in the hopes that it will help someone in the future. Thanks to those who helped point me in the right direction, and also those who said it couldn't be done, which sort of encouraged me to do it. :) WHY NON-ROOT? = If you need a high performance send-only MTA for sending mail to a large mailing list, but are using a shell account on a system on which you have no root access. I don't think qmail could be used to *receive* mail in this case (except that it can send postmaster bounces to you), since it would be running on a non-standard port. MY SITUATION I have a shell account with a webhosting company that allows daemons to be run in the background. I need to host a mailing list here, but the sendmail MTA that they provide me with delivers the messages too slowly (it's a discussion list with 3000 subscribers). Solution: Run qmail on port 2525. Listar (my mailing list software) still receives mail from sendmail on port 25, but uses qmail to distribute the messages to the list members. CONCISE SUMMARY === For those already familiar with running qmail (as root), I'll just give a quick terse description of what you need to do: * Edit conf-qmail and specify a writable directory to install in. * Replace the usernames in conf-users with your username. * Replace the group names in conf-groups with your group name. * Edit prot.c, putting return 0; at the beginning of the prot_gid and prot_uid functions so it doesn't call setuid and setgid. * Install ucspi-tcp and daemontools. You'll need multilog (since you can't write to the syslog), and tcpserver (to have qmail listen on a port). * Install qmail as normal, but set it up to work with multilog and tcpserver. THE SOLUTION Anyway, here's how to compile qmail when you're not root: Untar the qmail tarball. cd into the directory where it untarred. Edit conf-qmail and change /var/qmail to a directory that you can write to. I used /usr/home/pmak/var/qmail (/usr/home/pmak is my home directory). I will assume that you used $HOME/var/qmail for the rest of these instructions. Edit conf-users and replace all the usernames (the first 8 lines) with your username. Edit conf-groups and replace all the group names (the first 2 lines) with the name of the group that your username is in. mkdir $HOME/var/qmail Edit prot.c, inserting return 0; at the beginning of the prot_gid and prot_uid functions. This will prevent qmail from trying to change the userid/groupid (which would fail because you're not root). Now compile and run the configuration: make setup check ./config Setup your alias files (normally you'd do this in the home directory of the alias user; in this case you ARE the alias user): cd ~ touch .qmail-postmaster touch .qmail-mailer-daemon touch .qmail-root chmod 644 .qmail* cd $HOME/var/qmail cp boot/home rc Edit the rc file so that the last line says: qmail-start ./Mailbox multilog /usr/home/pmak/var/log replacing /usr/home/pmak/var/log with a directory you want to write your logs to. Install ucspi-tcp and daemontools (see http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#download). Read their README files to find out how to install them in a non-standard directory (since you're not root). Now just start the qmail daemon: csh -cf '$HOME/var/qmail/rc ' Configure tcpserver so that it can relay mail for the IP address that you need to (see http://www.palomine.net/qmail/selectiverelay.html). Specify the IP address, not the hostname of the host. Start tcpserver to listen to a port for receiving mail from: $HOME/usr/local/bin/tcpserver -H -P -R -l 0 -x$HOME/etc/tcp.smtp.cdb localhost 2525 $HOME/var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd -H -P -R -l 0 tells qmail not to perform DNS lookup on remote connections, which speeds things up quite a bit. 2525 is the port which tcpserver will listen on; you can change that. If everything went well, you now have a functional SMTP server running on port 2525. Any host that's listed in $HOME/etc/tcp.smtp can queue mail to that SMTP server and have it delivered for it. -Philip Mak ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
qmail or postfix for high volume mailing list?
Hello, I am looking into hosting a high volume discussion list (~3000 users, 20 MB of messages per month). The available hardware will probably be a RaQ3 server with 32 MB of RAM (should I pay for more RAM? if so, how much?), so I wouldn't have much system resources to spare. My preferred MLM is Listar. I'm looking into MTAs; from the various mailing list archives I've read on the web, it seems that qmail and postfix are the top MTAs. I could not find information to tell me which one would work better for my situation, however. Can someone tell me: Should I use qmail or postfix to run this discussion list? I am not very concerned about configuration difficulties since I only have to set it up one time, but performance will be important. -Philip Mak ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
