mini-HOWTO install qmail with MH <author>Christopher Richardson (rdn@tara.n.eunet.de) <date>v1.3 13.06.97 <abstract> I am just documenting my installation experiences to offer some help to other users who wish to use the above combination for their email. </abstract>  <toc>  <sect>Introduction My thanks to all netizens who have helped me, especially Tony Nugent (tony@trishul.sci.gu.edu.au), David Summers (david@summersoft.fay.ar.us) and S.u.S.E ( Linux distribution) who has made installing Linux so much easier, and the authors of the above excellent programs. What is qmail and why should I use it? Here is the author´s (Dan Bernstein) blurb: <tt>qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent. It is meant as a replacement for the entire sendmail-binmail system on typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts. Secure: Security isn't just a goal, but an absolute requirement. Mail delivery is critical for users; it cannot be turned off, so it must be completely secure. (This is why I started writing qmail: I was sick of the security holes in sendmail and other MTAs.) Reliable: qmail's straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a message, once accepted into the system, will never be lost. qmail also supports maildir, a new, super-reliable user mailbox format. Maildirs, unlike mbox files and mh folders, won't be corrupted if the system crashes during delivery. Even better, not only can a user safely read his mail over NFS, but any number of NFS clients can deliver mail to him at the same time. Efficient: On a Pentium under BSD/OS, qmail can easily sustain 200000 local messages per day---that's separate messages injected and delivered to mailboxes in a real test! Although remote deliveries are inherently limited by the slowness of DNS and SMTP, qmail overlaps 20 simultaneous deliveries by default, so it zooms quickly through mailing lists. (This is why I finished qmail: I had to get a big mailing list set up.) Simple: qmail is vastly smaller than any other Internet MTA. Some reasons why: (1) Other MTAs have separate forwarding, aliasing, and mailing list mechanisms. qmail has one simple forwarding mechanism that lets users handle their own mailing lists. (2) Other MTAs offer a spectrum of delivery modes, from fast+unsafe to slow+queued. qmail-send is instantly triggered by new items in the queue, so the qmail system has just one delivery mode: fast+queued. (3) Other MTAs include, in effect, a specialized version of inetd that watches the load average. qmail's design inherently limits the machine load, so qmail-smtpd can safely run from your system's inetd. Replacement for sendmail: qmail supports host and user masquerading, full host hiding, virtual domains, null clients, list-owner rewriting, relay control, double-bounce recording, arbitrary RFC 822 address lists, cross-host mailing list loop detection, per-recipient checkpointing, downed host backoffs, independent message retry schedules, etc. In short, it's up to speed on modern MTA features. qmail also includes a drop-in ``sendmail'' wrapper so that it will be used transparently by your current UAs.</tt> <sect>My System Details Cyrix 6x86, with the SuSE Linux Distribution. Kernel patched to 2.0.28 with the unofficial Cyrix patch ( from http://www.escnet.com/). Elsa Winner Trio +64 graphics card. PPP link to ISP <sect>Qmail Installation Follow the INSTALL instructions exactly. Notes: Please take the time to read the Fine documentation completely. The numerals refer to the installation steps in the above INSTALL doc. <itemize> <item> 2 - I had to set up the groups and users manually as per INSTALL.ids <item> 7 - ./qmail-makectl did not work on my system. I added my domain name (mickey.n.eunet.de) manually in /var/qmail/control/me <item> 23 - Make sure qmail-smtpd is spelt correctly in the inetd-conf file. (I spelt it incorrectly i.e. qmail-smptd, which took me two days to find:( ) smtp stream tcp nowait qmaild /var/qmail/bin/tcp-env tcp-env /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd </itemize> <sect1>Maildir2smtp Dan Bernstein has provided a package for sending queued email to an ISP via dial-in. This package is available as serialmailxxx from his site. Install this package as described in the man page (Thanks Rupert Mazzucco (maz@pap.univie.ac.at), it works out of the box! <tscreen><verb> maildir2smtp - blast a maildir across SMTP maildir2smtp is designed to pass messages along a SLIP or PPP link. To set this up on the disconnected end, create a new maildir in alias: # maildirmake ~alias/pppdir # chown -R alias ~alias/pppdir Put :alias-ppp into control/virtualdomains and ./pppdir/ into ~alias/.qmail-ppp-default. Don't forget the extra slash in pppdir/. Then, in the PPP startup script, do maildir2smtp ~alias/pppdir alias-ppp- $IP `hostname` replacing $IP with the remote IP address. </verb></tscreen> Notes: <itemize> <item>Please read the Fine manual page completely. <item>Maildir2smtp requires the dotted IP address of your mail server. If you do not have this then ping YourMail.host.country which will return the IP. <item>This command can be included in your login script to flush all queued mail after logging in to your ISP. </itemize> <sect>MH Installation In addition to this, I also replaced /mh-6.8.4/mts/sendmail/smail.c with Dan Bernstein´s mh-qmail-smail.c This is what my mh-6.8.4/conf/MH looks like: <tscreen><code> bin /usr/bin/mh etc /usr/lib/mh #mail #mandir /usr/man #manuals standard chown /bin/chown #cp cp #ln ln #remove mv -f cc gcc ccoptions -traditional -O2 -m486 -D_NFILE='getdtablesize()' -DSIGEMT=SIGUSR1 curses -lncurses #ldoptions -s #ldoptlibs lex flex #oldload off #ranlib on mts sendmail #mf off #bboards off #bbdelivery off #bbhome /usr/spool/bboards pop on popdir /usr/lib/mh sharedlib sys5 slflags -fPIC slibdir /usr/lib mailgroup mail signal void sprintf int #editor prompter #debug off #regtest off options ATHENA options BIND options DPOP options DUMB options FCNTL options MHE options MHRC options MIME options MORE='"/usr/bin/less"' options OVERHEAD options POP2 options POPSERVICE='"pop3"' options RENAME options RPATHS options RPOP options SOCKETS options SVR4 options SYS5 options SYS5DIR options TERMINFO options UNISTD options VSPRINTF </code></tscreen> Notes: <itemize> <item>I have only compiled ``mts sendmail'' - read in comp.mail.mh somewhere that /smtp can cause problems. Dominic Mitchell (hdm@demon.net) wrote in comp.mail.mh (13 June 1997): ``Not quite. With this option MH still talks SMTP, just over a pipe and not over a network. You *really* need a line in your ~/.mh_profile which says: postproc: /usr/local/nmh/lib/spost Or whever it's kept on your system. This will pass the message directly to sendmail in the traditional manner. You're using qmail of course, so sendmail will be qmail's wrapper script, but that's just fine.'' Thanks Dominic. <item>I have remmed out ``mail'' because I want to control it via mtstailor </itemize> <sect1>mtstailor As qmail delivers mail to the home directory (˜/Mailbox). I added the following to my mtstailor <tscreen><verb> localname: mickey localdomain: n.eunet.de mmdfldir: mmdflfil: Mailbox uucpldir: uucplfil: mmdelim1: \001\001\001\001\n mmdelim2: \001\001\001\001\n mmailid: 0 umincproc: lockldir: sendmail: /usr/lib/sendmail </verb></tscreen> Notes: <itemize> <item>sendmail: /usr/lib/sendmail is a link to the qmail sendmail wrapper in /var/qmail/bin <item>MH does not like the tilde notation (˜/) use /home instead or leave blank which according to the docs defaults to $HOME. <item>I recently installed MH and qmail on my office machine which is connect via ethernet. I added the following line to mtstailor: servers: mailserver.company.country </itemize> <sect1>mh_profile Here is my .mh_profile <tscreen><verb> Path: Mail draft-folder: drafts unseen-sequence: unseen AliasFile: /home/rdn/.mh_aliases send: -msgid comp: -form /home/rdn/.mymh-components MailDrop: /home/rdn/Mailbox </verb></tscreen> Notes: <itemize> <item>I put in the MailDrop line to be ``sure to be sure''. </itemize> <sect>Fetchmail I decided to use fetchmail because I have a multiuser (my family :). Linux and fetchmail delivers mail to the smtp port where qmail takes over. Installation was no problem, but I have not got the multidrop working correctly. Here is my .fetchmailrc <tscreen><verb> poll PersonalMail.Germany.EU.net protocol pop3 username myname password mypassword </verb></tscreen> <sect>Exmh This is my mailer by choice. I love it. There is one problem - most pre-compiled TCL/TK packages have the security option compiled in. The following script .xserverrc.secure which came with SuSE solves this. <tscreen><code> #!/bin/sh # # move this file to ~/.xserverrc, if you don't want to allow everybody to # get access to your X-Server # if [ -x /usr/bin/keygen ]; then if [ ! -x /usr/bin/hostname -a ! -x /bin/hostname \ -a ! -x /usr/bsd/hostname ]; then echo "startx: can't get my hostname - exiting" exit 1 else host=`hostname` fi xauth add $host:0 . `/usr/bin/keygen` sleep 2 xauth add $host/"unix":0 . `/usr/bin/keygen` exec X :0 -auth .Xauthority $* else exec X :0 $* fi </code></tscreen> <sect>Disclaimers The usual no guarantees, no money back, use at your own risk. <sect>Procmail The qmail FAQ gives this command: In ~/.qmail add the line <tscreen><verb> | preline procmail </verb></tscreen> On my system this works iff when using vi to generate the .qmail file, I included an empty line after the command. I recompiled the procmail package with my defaults. I added a link from my /usr/local/bin/procmail to /bin/procmail, because I was not sure that the command could find procmail in /usr/local/bin. Procmail is an excellently documented program. Read the man pages for examples on how to set up your .procmailrc file. <sect>Sources Required Packages <itemize> <item>Find Qmail, setserial on http://pobox.com/˜djb/qmail.html for other qmail-related software and a pointer to the qmail mailing list. <item>Find MH on ftp.ics.uci.edu:/pub/mh Tony Nugent has prepared a patch for the clean mh-6.8.3 sources (patch available ftp://ftp.gw.com/pub/unix/mail/mh/patches/linux/). <item>Find Metamail (for MIME support, including 8-bit charsets) on ftp.bellcore.com:/pub/nsb <item>Find Fetchmail on ftp://ftp.ccil.org/pub/esr/fetchmail Or you can get it from Eric's home page: http://www.ccil.org/˜esr <item>Find Glimpse, the full text search engine, at University of Arizona: http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu:1994/ <item>Find Exmh ftp.sunlabs.com/pub/tcl/exmh/ <item>Find TCL and TK on ftp.sunlabs.com:/pub/tcl ftp.aud.alcatel.com:/tcl ftp.cs.berkeley.edu:/ucb/tcl </itemize> </article>