I finally broke down and set myself free from sendmail and installed
qmail yesterday. I've got a Pentium Pro 200 with RedHat 5.2 (2.0.36)
and a small number of users. I first tried installing the memphis rpm
version of qmail which installed just fine, but I couldn't get it to
start qmail correctly. Supervise would start qmail, echo "qmail
starting up..." and then a few seconds later, I would keep getting a
message that supervise didn't have permissions to run qmail-start. When
I looked at the process listings, there would be 2 instances of
supervise trying to run qmail-start (my guess is that there should only
be 1). The second instance would die and then start again with a new
proc id.
So I decided that the easy way didn't work, let's try the more complex
way. I uninstalled all the daemontools, functions, qmail-run, qmail,
etc. rpms and went in search of different directions. Searching through
the list archive brought me to the Mail Server Mini-Howto at
http://www.sfu.ca/~yzhang/linux/qmail/index.html
Seemed like good straight-forward directions, which I then followed. I
got qmail installed, compiled and installed the modified version of
imap-4.7 (modified to point to $HOMEDIR/mail/inbox) and, after a few
fits and starts, SMTP, mail delivery, and POP3 were working. So far so
good.
My issue now is that I found out that a few of the users on the box were
using procmail (which I of course broke). So in the process of
researching about procmail and qmail I have come to realize that my
installation is pretty far from "standard". I realize that all "good"
unix programs provide at least 3 ways to do any given task, and that the
chosen path is usually influenced by habit and/or prejudice.
I've got mail being delivered (I think) to a single file in each user
directory. I'm not using any of the normal rc scripts found in the
/var/qmail/boot directory. I'm using a modified version of UW's IMAPd.
I now wonder what I should do to my setup so that I can reasonably meet
my mail-server goals which are:
1) Allow POP3, and APOP access in an efficient way
2) Allow users to use Pine and Procmail together
3) Let users set up mailing-lists
4) In the future, add web-based mail support
5) In the future, IMAP support
It seems to me (looking at the docs) that issues such as delivery to
/var/spool/mail, $HOME, or ~/Maildir/ may be able to be set up on a
per-user basis. Is this true? And how would I migrate my setup to one
that supports Maildir?
Is Dot-Forward/Procmail support best provided by moving to Maildir
format?
Any opinions on the easiest/best POP3/IMAPd to integrate with qmail?
There just seems to be so many ways of doing things that it's easy to
get lost. Do I uninstall everything and start over, compiling by hand?
Do I attempt to modify my current setup? Tough calls.
Any help for a new friend is greatly appreciated.
Judah McAuley
