linux-qmail.html

Linus guide, Linus guide, Linus guide,

<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Note: rcpthosts may include wildcards:
e.g. .heaven.af.mil</FONT></UL>

<H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">.qmail files</FONT></H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">There are five types of line in a .qmail file:</FONT>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">#comment</FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">&nbsp;|program to execute</FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">&nbsp;[&amp;]forwarding email address&nbsp;
# &amp; need if username does not begin with an alphanumeric character</FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">&nbsp;./mailbox deliver to a single mail <B>file</B>
(Mbox)</FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">&nbsp;./maidir/ deliver to a mail <B>directory</B>
(Maildir)</FONT></LI>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><B>Notes</B>:</FONT>
<UL>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">.qmail files cannot be group or world writable.</FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">qmail-local is invoked with a set of command
line parameters that are then makes available to any programs invoked in
.qmail (e.g. $SENDER)</FONT></LI>
</UL>

<H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Handling aliases</FONT></H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">There are basically two ways of handling the
incoming mail names and routing them to local user names.</FONT>
<H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Delivery by the alias user</FONT></H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">qmail by default can only recognise and deliver
to system user names (sim &amp; lies in this case).&nbsp; It does, however,
also postulate a set of related email addresses for each user of the form
user-<I>ext</I>.&nbsp; For any such address, qmail-local - which is the
qmail component responsible for final mail delivery - looks in ~/.qmail-ext
for delivery instructions.&nbsp; If no .qmail-ext file is found (or the
file exists but is empty), default delivery is to the file ~/Mailbox (unless
.qmail-default states otherwise??).</FONT>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Addresses which do not map to a specific
user (ignoring the "-ext" as necessary) are handled by the special alias
user.&nbsp; Recall, how during the installation procedure, .qmail files
were put in ~alias for root, postmaster and ...&nbsp; When alias is invoked,
qmail-local looks for a .qmail-username file for details of how to forward
the mail to a local user.</FONT>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">It follows that the apparent solution to
our objective is an ~alias/.qmail-simon.hampton file with "sim" as the
only contents (without quotations).&nbsp; In practice, the file needs to
be called ~alias/.qmail-simon:hampton&nbsp; <A HREF="ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/qmail/faq/incominguser.html#alias-dots">as
qmail requires "."s to be ":"</A>s in such instances, but apart from that
it is done.</FONT>
<H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Configuring users/assign</FONT></H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Arbitrary addresses can be assigned to specific
users using qmail-users.&nbsp; This is necessary, for instance, for my
incoming mail to simon.hampton (if you do not have a . in the name, it
may work with the alias solution)</FONT>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">/var/qmail/users/assign (See <A HREF="http://qmail.digibel.be/man/man9/qmail-users.html">http://qmail.digibel.be/man/man9/qmail-users.html</A>
for format)</FONT>
<BLOCKQUOTE>=simon.hampton:sim:1002:100:/home/sim:::
<BR>=liesbeth.devriendt:lies:1004:100:/home/lies:::
<BR>.</BLOCKQUOTE>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Do not forget to run /var/qmail/bin/qmail-newu
afterwards to convert assign to the necessary binary file, cdb.</FONT>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">As an alternative qmail-pw2u can build
a list for you from your /etc/password file.</FONT>
<H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Outgoing mails (qmail as a relay)</FONT></H4>

<H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Mail headers</FONT></H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">qmail is not great at rewriting headers on
outgoing mail, but these can probably be setup in mail client directly.&nbsp;
If however you leave the from address as sim (to facilitate correspondance
between users) in the mail client</FONT>
<UL>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">add the default domain to be appended to outgoing
mail in /var/qmail/control/defaultdomain</FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Users can also modify their From: headers
by using environment variables in .bash-profile</FONT></LI>

<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">export QMAILHOST=some.domain</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">export QMAILNAME=Peter Samuel</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">export QMAILUSER=Peter.Samuel</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">export QMAILINJECT=f</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">This becomes:</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">From: Peter Samuel &lt;[e-mail]></FONT></UL>

<H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Setting up a mailhost</FONT></H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">A mailhost is a machine that will perform
all the local deliveries for a site.&nbsp; It accepts mail from users throughout
the local network and from external</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">sources.&nbsp; All mail for local delivery
(domain specified in control/locals) is directed to the relevant postbox,
while the rest is passed to the relevant gateway.</FONT>
<P><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">The main configuration files are therefore:</FONT>
<UL>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">/var/qmail/control/locals : lists all local
domains</FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">control/smtproutes : <A HREF="http://qmail-docs.surfdirect.com.au/docs/qmail-1.03-man/man8/qmail-remote.html">See
man pages for format</A></FONT></LI>
</UL>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Seeting up a mailhost can expose you to security
concerns by creating an "open relay".&nbsp; The following provide guides
of the relatively complex process of howto to relay selectively:</FONT>
<UL>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Chris Johnson's <A HREF="http://www.palomine.net/qmail/relaying.html">qmail
newbie's guide to relaying</A></FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Michael Samuel's <A HREF="http://qmail-docs.surfdirect.com.au/docs/qmail-antirelay.html">How
to Configure Qmail to be a Selective Relay</A></FONT></LI>
</UL>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Don't forget to set up mail client to pass
outgoing mails to sendmail,</FONT>
<H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Restarting qmail</FONT></H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Many parts of qmail do not reread their configuration
files once started (unlike, for example, the <A HREF="samba.htm">samba</A>
server).&nbsp; Rebooting will lead the new configuration to be loaded,
but there are way of avoiding this time consuming activity.</FONT>
<H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Following changes to ..</FONT></H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">From section 4.7 of the <A HREF="http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Mail-HOWTO-4.html">mail-HOWTO</A>,
we have</FONT>
<BLOCKQUOTE><TT>killall [-HUP] inetd; init 1</TT></BLOCKQUOTE>

<H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Following changes to ....</FONT></H5>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><A HREF="ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/qmail/faq/admin.html#restart">qmail-send</A></FONT>
<H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Acknowledgements</FONT></H4>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">In addition to the sources mentioned above,
I was helped through this complex process by the following excellent sources:</FONT>
<UL>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">The powerpoint presentation at the <A HREF="http://www.nrg4u.com/">The
Big Picture</A></FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><A HREF="ftp://ftp.uniq.com.au/pub/tutorials/qmail-auug98.pdf">Peter
Samuel's qmail tutorial</A></FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><A HREF="http://www.qmail.org/man/index.html">The
man pages in HTML</A></FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><A HREF="http://qmail-docs.surfdirect.com.au/docs.html">Qmail
documentation project</A></FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><A HREF="http://www-archive.ornl.gov:8000/">Search
the mailing list archive</A></FONT></LI>
</UL>

<H3>
<A NAME="hostname"></A><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Hostname</FONT></H3>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">qmail relies absolutely on thecomputers hostname
being setup correctly.&nbsp; hostname -f should report the fully qualified
domain name, and this can also be found in /etc/HOSTNAME.&nbsp; Some configuration
help can be found in the Networking-HOWTO, and for the record the 3 key
files should have the following basic elements.</FONT>
<BR>&nbsp;
<TABLE BORDER COLS=3 WIDTH="100%" >
<TR>
<TD><B><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">/etc/hosts</FONT></B></TD>

<TD><B><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">/etc/hosts.conf</FONT></B></TD>

<TD><B><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">/etc/resolv.conf</FONT></B></TD>
</TR>

<TR VALIGN=TOP>
<TD><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">127.0.0.1&nbsp;&nbsp; localhost</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">[other home LAN hosts]</FONT></TD>

<TD><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">order hosts, bind</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">multi on</FONT></TD>

<TD><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">domain maths.wu.edu.au&nbsp;</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">search maths.wu.edu.au wu.edu.au&nbsp;</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">nameserver 192.168.10.1&nbsp;</FONT>
<BR><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">nameserver 192.168.12.1</FONT></TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

<P><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><B>Note</B>: linuxconf is capable of editing
most of these files</FONT>
<H3>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">Other programs</FONT></H3>

<UL>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><A HREF="http://www.sendmail.org/">Sendmail</A>:
the ubiquitous MTA, but difficult to configure,and reputedly not secure.</FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><A HREF="http://www.procmail.org/">Procmail</A>:
a powerful mail delivery agent capable of much finer analysis and distribution
of incoming mails.</FONT></LI>
</UL>

<HR><B><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica"><FONT SIZE=-1>Copyright &copy; 1999
<A HREF="mailto:[e-mail]">Simon
Hampton</A>. All rights reserved. Permission to use, distribute, and copy
this document is hereby granted. You may modify this document as long as
credit to me is given and I am informed of the changes.</FONT></FONT></B>
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