Qmail Howto
I wrote this guide for a couple of reasons. First, the existing qmail guides that I've found on the net did not provide a complete qmail solution. My first qmail installation was such a pain for me, that I had to go through a tough qmail learning process (yes, qmail can sometimes be a real pain, especially for newbies) and discover some things by myself. Of course, such great Internet resources as mailing lists and other qmail contributions made my life a lot easier :-) Konstantin Riabitsev's "Qmail-Vmailmgr-Courier-Squirrelmail Installation Guide" was the first guide that really helped me out. That's where I borrowed some stuff from while writing this guide - of course, with his agreement. Second, I simply love qmail and would like to contribute to its development, even a little bit. Third, I think that many admins out there will find this guide useful and practical. And fourth, every once in a while I do install qmail on different servers for various reasons and I simply got tired of carrying installation notes with me all the time. So, in a way, this guide is for myself too ;-)
Full Qmail Installation and Configuration Guide
or
Qmail + Vmailmgr + Tcpserver + RBL + SpamAssassin + Relay-CTRL + Qmail-Scanner + Courier IMAP Guide + POP3S + SMTPS
1) Who should use this guide?
Anyone who wants to install a complete qmail solution.
2) Can this guide be used for productive systems i.e. big servers?
It sure can. I've done some qmail installations in productive environments with many simultaneous users. And it works perfectly!
3) What about security?
Well, security has never been a problem with qmail. I haven't heard of anyone breaking NetQmail version 1.05 (the one we'll be installing). As for everything else we'll be doing here, many people find it pretty secure.
4) On what operating systems has this guide been tested on?
I've done testing mostly on Linux machines (Fedora, Redhat, Debian, Mandrake). So, I could say that everything should work flawlessly on any linux machine. It should also work on BSD systems.
5) Stuff we'll be needing (sources)
Download the following sources to a src directory i.e. /usr/local/src
Qmail-related stuff:
- NetQmail v1.06 from http://www.qmail.org
- Qmail Patches from http://mansurovs.com
- VMailMgr v0.97 from http://untroubled.org
- VMailMgr Tools v0.2 from http://untroubled.org
- Relay-CTRL v3.1.1 from http://untroubled.org
- Qmail-Autoresponder v0.97 from http://untroubled.org
- Ucspi-UNIX v0.36 from http://untroubled.org
- Ucspi-TCP v0.88 from http://cr.yp.to
- Daemontools v0.76 from http://cr.yp.to
- Courier-IMAP v3.0.8 from http://www.courier-mta.org
- MailDrop v2.0.4 from http://www.courier-mta.org
- TNEF v1.4.4 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tnef
- SpamAssassin v3.2.5 from http://spamassassin.apache.org
- Qmail-Scanner v2.05 from http://qmail-scanner.sourceforge.net
- Stunnel v3.26 from http://www.stunnel.org
For domain administration (via www) *:
- oMail-admin v1.2rc1 from http://omail.omnis.ch/
* I'm assuming that Apache web server and PHP are both installed, configured and fully operational on the machine you are installing qmail on. If you haven't yet installed Apache, there is another guide written by me which covers Apache installation with modules such as PHP. It can be accessed from here.
6) First things first
First, we'll have to get rid of your existing e-mail server. If you have just finished installing Linux on your machine, most probably sendmail is also installed. So, let's remove sendmail from your machine:
rpm -q -a | grep sendmail rpm -e sendmail --nodeps rpm -e sendmail-cf --nodeps rpm -e sendmail-devel --nodeps
This should get rid of all sendmail files on your machine.
If you have a FreeBSD system, run pkg_info | grep sendmail to see if you have sendmail installed on your system. If you do, run pkg_delete to get rid of sendmail completely.
7) Patch and Install Qmail
All right, now we are going to install Qmail from downloaded sources. We'll apply some necessary patches to Qmail, to make sure that the solution we are going to implement works perfectly.
OK, so first, we untar qmail and change directory to qmail sources. Then, we apply the needed patches to Qmail:
cd /usr/local/src tar zxf netqmail-1.06.tar.gz tar zxf qmail_patches.tar.gz mv qmail_patches/* netqmail-1.06/ rmdir ../qmail_patches cd netqmail-1.06 patch < qmail-big-ext-todo.patch patch < qmail-big-concurrency.patch patch < qmail-doublebounce-trim.patch patch < qmail-1.03-dns.patch patch < qmail-1.03-mfcheck.4.patch patch < qmail-1.03-pop3d-stat.patch patch < qmail-bounce.patch patch < qmail-bouncecontrol-1.03.patch patch < qmail-tarpit.patch patch < qmail-badrcptto.patch patch < qmail-smtpd-relay-reject.patch patch < qmail-accept-5xx.patch patch < qmail-nullenvsender.patch
Some of the above patches were modified by me because of some code conflicts. I did not create one big patch for everything since some of you might not want to install a specific patch. If you are interested in what each of the above patches does, here is some info:
- qmail-big-ext-todo.patch: The exttodo patch addresses a problem known as the silly qmail (queue) problem. This problem is found only on systems with high injection rates. qmail with a big local and remote concurrency could deliver a tremendous amount of messages but normally this can not be achieved because qmail-send becomes a bottleneck on those high volume servers. qmail-send preprocesses all new messages before distributing them for local or remote delivering. In one run qmail-send does one todo run but has the ability to close multiple jobs. Because of this layout qmail-send can not feed all the new available (local/remote) delivery slots and therefore it is not possible to achieve the maximum throughput. This would be a minor problem if one qmail-send run could be done in extreme short time but because of many file system calls (fsync and (un)link) a todo run is expensive and throttles the throughput. The exttodo patch tries to solve the problem by moving the todo routine into an external program. This reduces the run time in qmail-send.
- qmail-big-concurrency.patch: Allows qmail to use a concurrency greater than 240 (current qmail limit). It has been reported to work well in almost all environments and might be handy if you are expecting high volumes of mail traffic.
- qmail-doublebounce-trim.patch: I decided to integrate this patch because I got sick of double bounce messages sitting in qmail queue forever. Spammers usually fake the from field with an invalid email address, which results in thousands of bounce messages. This patch allows you to complete discard all double bounce messages to save server load and traffic.
- qmail-1.03-dns.patch: Christopher Davis's oversize DNS patch - it makes qmail accept oversized DNS packets. If you do not want some of the legitimate mail to get lost, I would recommend you to use this patch.
- qmail-1.03-mfcheck.4.patch: I consider this patch mandatory for any qmail installation. A lot of spammers use fake domain names in their messages - this patch checks if the domain in "from" field exists. If it doesn't, the email simply gets rejected.
- qmail-1.03-pop3d-stat.patch: This patch changes the number of messages returned in qmail-pop3d's reponse to STAT. The patch makes qmail fully compliant with RFC 1939, which specifies that deleted messages aren't counted in total.
- qmail-bounce.patch: Allows you to specify the limit for bounce messages in /var/qmail/control/bouncemaxbytes.
- qmail-bouncecontrol-1.03.patch: Allows you to control the appearance of bounce messages. Very handy if you want to change the default bounce message or add a message in another language.
- qmail-tarpit.patch: The tarpit patch is targeted towards spammers who try to bomb your mail server with a long list of recipients. It inserts small delays in an smtp session for each recipient in the mail message (after some set number of recipients). This slows down their session, resulting in timeouts in spammer's mail software.
- qmail-badrcptto.patch: Lets you reject e-mail at the smtp envelope (rcpt) phase, which can produce a considerable bandwidth saving when a lot of e-mail is directed at non-existing users. Instead of receiving the body of the e-mail and then rejecting it in qmail-send, you can reject it before receiving the body. This can be very useful in a setup where you have one qmail box accepting all the e-mail, which then passes it on to another (q)mail box behind it.
- qmail-smtpd-relay-reject.patch: Russell Nelson's patch to reject relay probes generated by "anti-spammers". These relay probes have '!', '%' and '@' in the local (username) part of the address. The patch detects them and issues a 553 error "we don't relay".
- qmail-accept-5xx.patch: Adrian Ho's patch to increase qmail-remote's compliance with RFC2821. Some smtp servers are now emitting 5xx responses from the get-go, and mere RFC821 behavior doesn't deal well with them.
- qmail-nullenvsender.patch: A lot of your spam will be arriving with a null envelope sender. When those spam messages have multiple envelope recipients, they cannot be bounce messages. This patch rejects emails addressed to multiple recipients with a null envelope sender.
Right now qmail is fully patched. All we need to do is install it. Before running make, we'll first create necessary user accounts and groups that qmail needs for running. We will also create a qmail directory /var/qmail. Make sure that you have enough space in that partition.
mkdir /var/qmail cd /usr/local/src/netqmail-1.05/netqmail-1.05 groupadd -g 5000 nofiles groupadd -g 5001 qmail useradd -u 5000 -g nofiles -d /var/qmail/alias alias useradd -u 5001 -g nofiles -d /var/qmail qmaild useradd -u 5002 -g nofiles -d /var/qmail qmaill useradd -u 5003 -g nofiles -d /var/qmail qmailp useradd -u 5004 -g qmail -d /var/qmail qmailq useradd -u 5005 -g qmail -d /var/qmail qmailr useradd -u 5006 -g qmail -d /var/qmail qmails
If you have a FreeBSD system, the above won't work. You will have to add groups and users manually into /etc/groups and /etc/master.passwd and then remake the user database by issuing pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd. Here is what you would have to do under FreeBSD:
cd /etc echo "nofiles:*:5000:" >> group echo "qmail:*:5001:" >> group echo "alias:*:5000:5000::0:0::/var/qmail/alias:" >> master.passwd echo "qmaild:*:5001:5000::0:0::/var/qmail:" >> master.passwd echo "qmaill:*:5002:5000::0:0::/var/qmail:" >> master.passwd echo "qmailp:*:5003:5000::0:0::/var/qmail:" >> master.passwd echo "qmailq:*:5004:5001::0:0::/var/qmail:" >> master.passwd echo "qmailr:*:5005:5001::0:0::/var/qmail:" >> master.passwd echo "qmails:*:5006:5001::0:0::/var/qmail:" >> master.passwd pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd
Related posts:
09/11/2004 - 18:10
Wow, this Qmail guide is simply awesome! It helped me a lot, thanks!
10/04/2004 - 01:21
I am so thankfull to you because your this qmail Installation guides solves my all qmail related problems and now i make a mail server very confident
Thanks again for helping to other peoples
10/05/2004 - 13:45
Hey, your howto is great. simple, straight forward. I was able to pick the things I want and dumpt the others. Keep up the great work :-).
10/16/2004 - 15:38
Really helpful. Thank you Nasim!
I have a Mandrake 10 setup, and the only problems I have had so far with this guide are:
- with higher Mandrake security levels (msec 4) I have to cd to /var/qmail/logs in the qmail rc file because root (/) is not readable by user qmaill and the security system diligently reverses a ‘chmod o+r /’
- qmail rc file should say ‘qmail-start ./Maildir/’ NOT ‘qmail-start ./Maildir’
10/27/2004 - 21:52
First of all I think you have done a great job in writing these tutorials or guides. However this qmail guide is rather confusing….at least to me. You don’t mention anything about qmail-1.03 during the downloading of the source files…but all of a sudden, you want the user (person who is installing or following this guide) to cd to /usr/local/src/qmail-1.03.
In other words, you finish patching and then you create the /var/qmail directory and then …..out of no where you do # cd /usr/local/src/qmail-1.03 and continure with adding the needed users and groups for qmail. Then the most confusing thing about your guide is when you make small Note: which ends like this ………..If for some reason you are trying to compile qmail-1.03 instead of netqmail-1.05, you might encounter compilation problems with the latest versions of glibc (especially on Redhat Linux 9). In this case, use this patch and try recompiling qmail again. To apply the patch, cd to your qmail directory and type patch -p1 < qmail-1.03.errno.patch ………. My question is "should there be any reason why someone should be installing qmail-1.03 ? If yes …how come you have not mentioned it ? At least in the phase where you download all the source files. May be I am dumb ….but this is a little frustrating. Anyway, I hope you don't take this as an attack …..I have no such intentions…
10/27/2004 - 22:20
I figured it out. I guess I am dumb ….but this is what you have to do u happen to get an error or come to a place where u r as confused as I was …do the following;
where is says “cd /usr/local/src/qmail-1.03″ do “cd netqmail-1.05″ and then continue with “make” and then “make setup check” . Thanks for the wonderful guide. I used the apache install guide too and that had a key peice of information missing. But all in all …great job …keep up the good work.
10/28/2004 - 20:56
Tbone: Regarding your first comment – I’ve had a typo, thanks for letting me know.
10/30/2004 - 20:17
First of all, please don’t take my comments as personal attacks ….lol ….not the intention. The reason why I am mentioning this is because, when I read my own comments they come out as very negative. I guess I was frustrated …I apologize for that,. Anyway, on page five of the qmail guide …if you focus on the area where you are installing the sophos anti virus, first of all you might want to consider upgrading the guide to say something I found out. When installing Sophos to work with Sophie, you are going to find out that sophos is not free. Cannot be bought online unless you contact one of the local sales person. You might be able to find the file “linux.intel.libc6.tar.Z” and there is another one which was compiled with/on an earlier version of glibc and/or gcc. I am not sure. If you google this, you might come across a post where the solution appears to be compile Sophos on a earlier version of RedHat 7 or 8. I might give it a try after I get my RH 7.3 going. Even though I was able to install Sophos and even got the ’sweep -v’ to work. Was able to scan to on my RH 9. But when installing Sophie, you are going to get nagging error when Sohpie tries to find the savi libraries even though we specify it on the ./configure command. For example, # ./configure –with-user=qmaill –with-group=nofiles –with-savilib=/usr/local/lib . Even though the libraries were there in my case, the configure script was not seeing it. I am also suspecting a ldconfig issue. So in short ……………. I think I am going to by the savi engine ( heard you can buy that separately) and then going to start from scratch on my RH 7. Another place there could be some confusions/problems is the place where you are installing the PERL module Sys::Syslog. I ran into alot of issue here. If you have any questions please let me know. Great guide…..Gotta say …..A great guide that I have seen in a very long time.
11/01/2004 - 08:30
I found that the Maildrop wouldn’t compile, had to download it from this location instead
http://www.courier-mta.org/?download.php~maildrop
12/09/2004 - 09:39
checking for SAVIsweepFile in -lsavi… no
** libsavi library NOT FOUND
** You need libsavi in order to use Sophie.
** Download it at http://www.sophos.com/
This error persist.
I create libsavi.so for libsavi.so.3
Please.. help me!
12/12/2004 - 07:50
I cann’t compile “qmail-autoresponder” at Fedora Core 3
Setup and Testing has Completed…
Error Message ….
[shinseunghyeok@gumi_in_korea qmail-autoresponder-0.96.1]# make
./compile qmail-autoresponder.c
qmail-autoresponder.c:6:21: str/str.h: No such file or directory
qmail-autoresponder.c:7:21: sysdeps.h: No such file or directory
In file included from qmail-autoresponder.c:8:
qmail-autoresponder.h:18: error: syntax error before “response”
qmail-autoresponder.h:18: warning: type defaults to `int’ in declaration of `response’
qmail-autoresponder.h:18: warning: data definition has no type or storage class
qmail-autoresponder.c: In function `read_message’:
qmail-autoresponder.c:25: warning: implicit declaration of function `str_catb’
qmail-autoresponder.c: In function `count_history’:
qmail-autoresponder.c:63: error: `DIR’ undeclared (first use in this function)
qmail-autoresponder.c:63: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
qmail-autoresponder.c:63: error: for each function it appears in.)
qmail-autoresponder.c:63: error: `dir’ undeclared (first use in this function)
qmail-autoresponder.c:63: warning: implicit declaration of function `opendir’
qmail-autoresponder.c:64: error: `direntry’ undeclared (first use in this function)
qmail-autoresponder.c:64: error: `entry’ undeclared (first use in this function)
qmail-autoresponder.c:85: warning: implicit declaration of function `readdir’
make: *** [qmail-autoresponder.o] Error 1
12/12/2004 - 22:53
You forgot to have people create teh qmail user…. you first realize this when you go to set the ownership of /var/qmail/logs… OOOOOPPPPSS!
12/13/2004 - 01:30
I have already user qmail… and changed ownership ‘qmaill:nofiles’ at /var/qmail/logs…. Hmmm….
12/23/2004 - 22:03
First of all, this installation guide gives me very direct instruction on how to install qmail and related stuffs. I used this guide to install for more than 3 email servers. However, since net-qmail-1.05, i found a very strange problem when applying all the patch, as suggested in this guide. Sometimes, the qmail-smtpd process will be in dead-looping, and occupy server loading 1 for each looping process. ( i.e. 3 dead looping qmail-smptd process, the server loading become 3, and those process will never die itself ).
After few weeks of observation, i found that some SMTP connection to this full-patched email server will cause the qmail-smtpd to hang. As i can’t repeat the dead-looping by myself, i can just have no solution to it. Yesterday, i found that, when using Norton 200x, with outgoing email scanning, and use this server as SMTP server, the smtpd process will certainly in dead-looping. and in client side, the notron scanning for that particular email will hang, and finally time out.
I’m not sure which patches here, related to smtpd.c will cause this… anyway, don’t apply any patches solved the problem i encountered.
I just want to report. and let see any guys have the same problem.. and anyone have idea which patch would cause this problem.. Thx.
12/24/2004 - 02:01
Don’t apply “qmail-antispoofing.patch” – it’s the one that’s causing the hang issue.
12/29/2004 - 15:03
Hello,
I’m installing qmail and I have the same problem than hitomi with the qmail-autoresponder compilation under Fedora. I have the same error message (patched or not) and trying the both make commands). Anyone solved that ?
Thank you
01/11/2005 - 21:38
Another small addition. Before starting the Courier-imap install, think whether you will ever need to run secure imap process…if the answer is YES …then you might want to enable the ssl support. (e.g. –with-ssl ). There are other nice configuration options that you might want to think about if you are planning on using Courierpassd utility to allow users to change their passwords remotely. Especially when using together with Squirrelmail to change users passwords. There is a good document I came across that explains how to set all this up. If you have a little brain cells available and some time …you can combine the section on installing courier-imap from this tutorial with the one I found which should be available at http://freebsd.qmailrocks.org/imap.htm This site has some good resources. Another document that might come in handy if you want to know about courier-imap options and stuff …check this out http://www.inter7.com/courierimap/INSTALL.html#requirements
Later all. ……keep up the good work ….
——–tarbash
01/20/2005 - 10:10
U R THE MAN!
many thanks for your work!
01/25/2005 - 14:55
I was wondering if anyone has seen a problem with qmail where after DATA is requested it sends the 354 go ahead … but it times out at this point .
I am unsure if qmail/tcpserver is not accepting a line of data then just times out or if the other side is not sending the data at this point..
It seems to be a problems when the other server is postfix and the message is larger. In anycase I am losing emails because the server is timing out at that point and sending
451 timeout(4.4.1) … if I send a small message from the same server it goes though find though
any ideas?
01/31/2005 - 21:03
airman , what are your memory limits set to ?
02/04/2005 - 13:40
Please add downloadable scripts in text format, this will make life a lot easier for those of us using lynx.
Thanks for the great guide …
02/14/2005 - 08:45
About the vdeliver-postdeliver script, the right line should be :
qmail-autoresponder $MAILDIR/autoresponse/message.txt $MAILDIR/autoresponse
Well at least for the example given in the tutorial didn’t work. To be really clean you can add a `pwd` before the $MAILDIR
02/20/2005 - 23:54
I’m using courier-imap-3.0.7 with fedora core 2 (2.6.5-1.358smp).
For two servers with this config, i found that when user check email through webmail (squirrel mail), the email should move from “new” user folder to “cur” user folder (from courier-imap’s basic config). However, some “dead” file will be generated inside the “cur” folder. When i “ls” that file, “Input/Output Error” will be generated in console.
This error happen quite often. I cannot delete those file coz this will crush the parition (i tried) and end up to format that partition again. I’m quite sure that it is the problem related to this courier-imap release and this linux kernel, by prove by two different hardware config servers. I searched through web and have no solution.
Can anyone help me on this? or anyone encountered the same issue?
05/11/2005 - 07:22
Anyone knows how a user from local domain can be controlled to send or not mail to a qmail-ldap alias(using a /var/qmail/alias/.qmail-x file) ?
(Maybe u can send an answer to dann26@gmail.com to). Thank you.
06/08/2005 - 18:48
Hi, How do I collect all messages sent to non existent users on my qmail server to a single account (spamtrap)? Ex: messages to 090191@example go to spamtrap@example
06/15/2005 - 21:28
I’m using the latest courier-imap (version 4+) and the installation is broken down into two packages (courier-imap / courier-authlib) and i was wondering if anyone can get imap to work because this writeup uses 3.0 courier-imap and at that time they were the same package i think. Every time i click on the folders to dl them i instantly get an error.
All the directories are different but i linked most of them and pop3/smtp works great just can’t manage to get imap working.
I’m also having the same issue with qmail-autoresponder on the compile that someone posted in post # 11. Any fix yet?
Jun 15 19:41:31 pnot imapd: Connection, ip=[::ffff:63.115.64.11]
Jun 15 19:41:31 pnot imapd: authdaemon: s_connect() failed: Connection refused
Jun 15 19:41:31 pnot imapd: [Hint: perhaps authdaemond is not running?]
Jun 15 19:41:31 pnot imapd: LOGIN FAILED, user=test@pnot.camnv.com, ip=[::ffff:63.115.64.11]
Jun 15 19:41:31 pnot imapd: authentication error: Connection refused
06/27/2005 - 21:02
The error in post#11 is due to not finding the bglibs package. It needs to be installed and then the conf-bglibs and conf-bgincs file need to be upgraded to point to where ever they are installed.
09/20/2005 - 09:38
Hi,
i have done all the steps, but i don’t understand where the passwd file is? how can i recognize th user? can you tell me.
thanks in advance,
Enora
09/26/2005 - 03:14
I try to use linux base
12/23/2005 - 03:21
Hi,
It’s a great site, congratulations!
I’ve found a qmail-antispoofing.patch in your qmail_patches.tar.gz, but I haven’t seen description of it. Could you write a couple of sentences about it?
Thank, Erno
01/02/2006 - 21:33
If anyone has been having problems check your runmail logs: /var/qmail/logs/pop3, vmailmgr, and smtp. I was having a problem where the logs reported funny errors:
relay-ctrl-chdir[4385]: Fatal: execution of program failed!
i discovered i was receiving that error because i already was running another pop and smtp service from a plesk installation i thought i disabled. i ran the tcpserver command inidividually and got the error referenced here about binding to port 100 http://www.qmailrocks.org/faq/?category=qmail#48 . I double checked and sure enough the services were starting.
Guide guide Nasim my hats off to you. I’m completely new to email and if it werent for this excellent guide i never would have gotten through it.
Thanks,
will
03/12/2006 - 07:07
How to apply SMTP-AUTH patch without errors.
thnks for the nice guide
03/13/2006 - 03:55
On Debian Sarge, before running the configure script for courier-imap-3, I had to install libgdbm-dev package first:
# apt-get install libgdbm-dev
03/13/2006 - 04:24
On Debian Sarge, before running make for courier-imap-3, I had to install libgssl-dev package first:
# apt-get install libssl-dev
03/13/2006 - 04:29
On Debian Sarge, I could compile vmailmgr-0.97 with the default compiler (gcc-3.3.5) without any problem :)
06/07/2006 - 10:00
good tutorial, i plan to implement on solaris, hope it works!
would be better if instead of sophos utilize clamav ? to keep all free or open?
07/27/2006 - 07:14
qmail-scanner 2.01 have better function to deal with spam mail, but I can’t make it work (can’t get mails anymore! ), would you please have a try and share at here?
07/28/2006 - 04:22
Hello.
Thanks in a bunch for a nice guide.
I believe this guide will fix my existing problem – because now, my MTA accepting all incoming emails eventhough there are no such addresses.
Keep on the good work!
09/23/2006 - 19:09
[root@tech-hosting/programe/QMAIL/relay-ctrl-3.1.1]# /var/qmail/rc
/var/qmail/rc: line 5: setuidgid: command not found
[root@tech-hosting/programe/QMAIL/relay-ctrl-3.1.1]# /usr/local/bin/runmail
/usr/local/bin/runmail: line 8: setuidgid: command not found
/usr/local/bin/runmail: line 17: setuidgid: command not found
/usr/local/bin/runmail: line 25: setuidgid: command not found
11/28/2006 - 07:40
if you don’t create control/smtpgreeting
you cant start smtpd…
qmail-smtpd.c:119
if (control_rldef(&greeting,”control/smtpgreeting”,1,(char *) 0) != 1)
die_control();
[root@mailings ~]# telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
421 unable to read controls (#4.3.0)
Connection closed by foreign host.
so, create controls/smtpgreeting
02/07/2007 - 00:16
You have provided a solution with easy steps..nice to know it!
Don Lapre Albert
webmaster@gidnoc.com
http://www.gidnoc.com
04/18/2007 - 21:38
Dear Mr. Nasim,
Your configuartion script is really good one but little tough..anyway its good.
Do you have any configuration manual to install netqmail in debian-3.0 ?
Do you have any configuration manual to install PPP in debian-3.0?
04/23/2007 - 23:35
Rajesh says,
I want to know whether the qmail users are systems users like in qmail or database users like in qmail-toaster.Please let me know
My email id rajesh.webindia@gmail.com
05/11/2007 - 13:27
During Courier-IMAP Installation (page 5), it won’t compile on Fedora core 4, or 6.
I tried it on FC6 first. Then I tried it on a clean install of FC4.
Both times, the “make” step give this error:
make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/local/src/courier-imap-3.0.8/authlib’
Compiling authexit.c
Compiling chain.c
chain.c: In function âauthchainâ:
chain.c:49: warning: ignoring return value of âdupâ, declared with attribute warn_unused_result
Compiling checkpassword.c
Compiling cryptpassword.c
Compiling authstaticlistsearch.c
In file included from authstaticlistsearch.c:9:
/usr/include/stdio.h:385: error: syntax error before â&&â token
make[2]: *** [authstaticlistsearch.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/courier-imap-3.0.8/authlib’
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/courier-imap-3.0.8/authlib’
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
A search on google / yahoo turned up somebody else who encountered the same error on FC5. But no solution on how to fix the problem.
Note:
I ran configure as follows:
./configure –disable-root-check –with-redhat
and it ran without a problem.
I’m currently stuck.
Any ideas on how to solve this?
06/04/2007 - 20:17
Nice post,thanks a lot! :)
06/26/2007 - 20:22
I have to send more than 1 million mail per day . how can increase qmail with these patches.
thanks a lot.
RM
06/27/2007 - 13:19
Articles about stunnel
http://onix.opennet.ru/content/view/34/26/
http://onix.opennet.ru/content/view/38/26/
http://onix.opennet.ru/content/view/39/26/
07/06/2007 - 03:20
Hi,
everything works fine, but the usernames containing . (dot) like praveen.b are not working on the server it says invalid username. anyone here can help me?
thanks in advance,
Praveen
08/26/2007 - 22:37
sir i wan to take ur help regarding qmail.as i am the student of MIT (Master Of Information Technology) .sir i have to submit my final project which is “Implemantation of qmail Server” Sir can u help me or guid me how i can perform well.what will be the steps which i have to folow so that i can complete my project with in time.i have only one month to complete my task.
waiting for ur rply .thank you
10/08/2007 - 12:01
Thank You very much, it´s very good.
I have a problem with qmail inject and something comes out on the screen like:
“qmail-inject: fatal: qq waitpid surprise (#4.3.0)”
do you have an idea to fix-it ?
sorry for the inconvinience
10/31/2007 - 10:10
I have a problem with autoresponse. When it send’s the response, the sender address goes like this “”@domain.com . This way, it’s always flaged as relay, on my relay server.
Do you have any hint?
11/14/2007 - 02:40
Hi,
Really good site. Thanks for your valuable help. Do you have anything similar for postfix,mysql,dovecoat with webmail option. Since all these can be installed along with the O.S. and only need to integrate.
Rgds,
Saji Alexander.
11/28/2007 - 18:32
if you’re having problems making Courier for Fedora/Redhat with error /usr/include/stdio.h:385: error: syntax error before ‘&&’ token , you can find information here http://atmail.com/view_article.php?num=199
01/20/2008 - 15:07
I installed Your Qmail-modification a couple of years ago. Thanks for that! Now I would like to use your patch for bounce handling.
patch
03/04/2008 - 02:46
Hi,
how can we know a email is bounced or not ?? qmail handles smtp return codes ??
Thanks,
Satish.K
03/25/2008 - 03:46
/usr/local/bin/setuidgid qmaill “contrib/test_installation.sh -doit”
i stuck at that line and my fedora 8 give me :
/usr/local/bin/setuidgid qmaill “contrib/test_installation.sh -doit”
setuidgid: fatal: unable to run contrib/test_installation.sh -doit: file does not exist
AND also when i run : # /usr/local/bin/setuidgid qmaill \
“/var/qmail/bin/qmail-scanner-queue.pl” -g
perlscanner: generate new DB file
perlscanner: total of 9 entries.
my fedora 8 only reply : perlscanner: generate new DB file
**Please help me, it’s already 2 to 3 days since i tried to solve it but can’t…
04/30/2008 - 17:53
Hi Nasim. Thanks a lot for providing nice and very helpful instructions in plain english :-)
I’ve installed mail production server on Debian(4) using your guidlines.
Although I came across some problems after install, i.e. when I have created second virtual domain, mail server stopped recieving any messages at all(even though the first virtual domain was working on it’s own before). Is it something to do with Qmail-Scanner, where by one required to enter domains’ names before installing it(–local-domains “domain.one.com,domain.two.com”; page 5 of your instractions)?
Thanks a lot in advance if you can spare some time to answer this question.
Kind regards,
yuriy
05/01/2008 - 10:31
Yuriy, are you still receiving mail for the first domain that you had created before? Also, a little troubleshooting would definitely help. Try this:
1) Telnet to your server’s IP address port 25 by typing “telnet x.x.x.x 25″
2) Type “HELO test.com” or some other domain and press enter
3) Type “MAIL FROM:test@test.com” and press enter
4) Type “RCPT TO:test@yourdomain.com” and press enter
5) Type “DATA” and press enter
6) Type some garbage and then type “.” on a separate line. The server should respond “250 ok xxxxxxx qp xxxxx”.
7) Type “quit” on a separate line and see what output you get.
8) While doing all of the above check your qmail logs. Both the incoming tcp logs and your qmail logs.
9) After you are done with the telnet session, your logs should report what the problem is.
If your domain is not in one of the configuration files, you will get a descriptive error in the log. If there is any other problem, you should see it in the log as well.
If you can’t telnet to your server, then your tcpserver is having a problem and might need to be rebooted.
Hope the above helps.
Nasim
05/06/2008 - 07:36
i’m sorry..could you give me a module to make QMAIL in SLACKWARE 12, i have try to make it, but not suxess..please. for my homework
05/06/2008 - 11:11
Hi Nazim.
I can telnet to my server and do all steps you have listed alright. It’s just when I’m trying to set additional virtual domain it stops receiving emails(one can still send emails though) even to the first virtual domain. When I remove the second virtual domain it will start to receive emails but only after couple hours.I reckon that it’s Qmail-Scanner coursing this problem. I probably leave this issue to sort later on(I’m planning to install another test server but will keep in mind using more than one domain then).
I have couple more issues which require immediate attention and I was trying to sort them out but no luck so far.
1. I need to set our email server to give a 550 error for an invalid address. I have used Andrew Richards’ qmail-verify patch(http://free.acrconsulting.co.uk/email/qmail-verify.html). I can see qmail-verify daemon is running on our server but it’s not rejecting non-existing users(so it’s accepting anything with our domain). The problem could be that /home/email/[virtual_domain]/.qmail-default telling that anything coming with this domain is valid.
But because I’m using virtual domain .qmail-default pipes to /usr/local/bin/vdeliver.So vdeliver is deciding who is right users on our server. Andrew suggested to remove /home/email/[virtual_domain]/.qmail-default but when I did it email server stopped to receive emials. Do you know what parameters I need to pass to /usr/local/bin/vdeliver in /home/email/[virtual_domain]/.qmail-default so qmail-verify can properly filter email users?
2. Due to the increase in the number of ISP’s blocking port 25 for third party mailservers I need to set on mail server additional port to answer SMTP request. I was looking on google and found the following link http://www.skorpionweb.org/archives/2005/09/running_qmail_s.php.
So I followed the logic in this article and set separate tcpserver which listens to different port:
1) Created /var/qmail/rc2 :
#!/bin/sh
PATH=”/var/qmail/bin:/usr/local/bin”
export PATH
cd /
qmail-start ./Maildir | setuidgid qmaill \
multilog t n50 s1000000 \
/var/qmail/logs/qmail2 &
2) Created /usr/local/bin/runmail2:
exec softlimit -m 10000000 \
envdir /etc/relay-ctrl relay-ctrl-chdir \
tcpserver -v -H -R -l $HOSTNAME -x /etc/tcp.smtp.cdb -c200 -u5002 -g5000 0 587 qmail-smtpd 2>&1 &
3) Created /var/qmail/logs/qmail2 and chown it to qmaill:nofiles.
Now I can start separate tcpserver with port 587 and everything looks healthy with but when I change port 25 to 587 and try to send mail I have got an error “…The server may be unavailable or refusing connection…”
I wonder whether I need to set another instance of qmail-smtpd(may be qmail-smtpd2, just guessing here).
Thanks a lot again for your time and effort to keep this site going & helping folks like myself :-)
Kind regards, yuriy
05/24/2008 - 23:59
Hi Nazim,
Problem with setting second virtual domain was sorted out. It turned out that one needs to restart qmail server after adding another virtual domain.
Also I have sorted an issue with 550 error page(I have wrote about it in one of my previous posts).
With virtual domain .qmail-default file should exist for each user. So solution was pretty simple: copy original .qmail-default to .qmail-USERNAME in /home/email/yourdomain/ folder. Also my /etc/tcp.smtp looks like this:
127.:allow,RELAYCLIENT=”",RBLSMTPD=”",QMAILQUEUE=”/var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue”
:allow,QMAILQUEUE=”/var/qmail/bin/qmail-scanner-queue.pl”,VERIFY=”"
05/25/2008 - 02:29
Hi Nazim,
Sometimes I have an error when sending email(addresses which I used before or new):
An error occurred while sending mail.The mail server responded: sorry, that domain isn’t in my list of allowed rcpthosts(#5.7.1). Please check the message recipients and try again.
I thought that it something to do with timing out authentication so I have removed 900 from /etc/relay-ctrl/expiry(step 12->Installing Relay-CTRL; pagehttp://mansurovs.com/2002/12/20/qmail-howto/4) but I’m still getting this error.
I’ll appreciate if you could advice on what could be wrong, please.
Thanks a lot in advance,
yuriy
05/30/2008 - 10:10
Hi Nasim:
Have you tried to use CourierIMAP 4.3.1 (with AuthLib)?
I would appreciate your comments about it.
Thanks.
06/20/2008 - 19:22
This was helpful. Thank you.
06/29/2008 - 14:03
Nice tutorial. If anyone needs help, you can contact my via email on my website.
I could do it for free.
09/05/2008 - 16:04
> – Qmail Patches from http://mansurovs.com
Where is the patches, i find but…
10/03/2008 - 07:19
So what if I want a more minimalistic solution. Basically I have a mail server that only needs to serve one site, and primarily outgoing mail. So no fancy stuff needed like multiple users and auto-responders.
I would like to have a suite of admin tools, for instance, being able to manually send an email that’s been stuck in the queue and watching the remote mail server response, ideally have a php script parse this information.
Hours on Google have really only given me scripts for the end-user, none for really managing the admin part of qmail.
10/16/2008 - 23:09
Nice tutorial. This is only the patch that I haven’t encountered a problem.
I hope you can add a patch such as validrcptto. This is nice patch. However, I’m getting a hunk failed when I’m trying to patch it after patching all the patch on your tutorial. Probably, some code doesn’t conform to validrcptto patch. I’m not a C programmer so I’m getting a hard time fixing the problem. Please inform me via my email ntserafica@yahoo.com if you have the patch.
This could be a great gift this coming christmas :)
03/27/2009 - 22:20
can you have an instruction on how to get squirrelmail work together with your tutorial..
Thank in advanced
03/28/2009 - 01:50
I followed you through step 17.1 everything work fine but when I telnet to port 15 and 110 …these errors occur
===============================================
telnet 127.0.0.1 25
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 tnway.com ESMTP
exit
502 unimplemented (#5.5.1)
quit
======================================================
telnet 127.0.0.1 110
Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
+OK
hello
-ERR authorization first
exit
-ERR authorization first
=============================================
What wrong with me ? I really need your help
Thank in advanced
03/28/2009 - 01:56
billyduc,
Just install Courier IMAP and you will be able to use Squirrelmail or any other web-based mail system. I personally use Horde http://www.horde.org/ and love the functionality.
Regarding your other issues with telnetting – the output seems to be normal and the services are responding. Did you try to send an email to your server through an external provider like gmail/yahoo? Did you try to use a client like Outlook to download emails through POP3/IMAP?
Nasim
03/30/2009 - 01:50
I use Evolution for email client.
I setup for “test” account to send and receive mail
When I clicked Send / Receive Button. It prompt me
Unable to connect to POP server myhost.mydomain.com.
Error Sending password : -ERR authorization failed
Please enter the POP password for test on host myhost.mydomain.com
I enter the password for test account……But the error window is open
Error While Fetching Mail
Unable to connect to POP server myhost.mydomain.com.
Error Sending password : Operation now in progress
05/05/2009 - 13:21
hey, i wrote a practical step-by-step how-to on qmail… please see the link: “http://119.15.153.9/qmail/qmail-install.html” , i hope some one will require it.
07/17/2009 - 11:06
Great howto, tnx!
08/19/2009 - 15:37
When I was trying to compile the qmail-autoresponder-0.97, it gave me the following error messages:
main.c: In function âexec_qmail_injectâ:
main.c:257: warning: missing sentinel in function call
./compile options.c
options.c:1:25: error: mysql/mysql.h: No such file or directory
make: *** [options.o] Error 1
I have the mysql installed. Please help.
Thank you
11/14/2009 - 15:09
I did “apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev” and it solved the problem with options.c:1:25: error: mysql/mysql.h: No such file or directory
11/14/2009 - 15:13
Andreas, thank you for the input!
Whenever there is a problem with mysql.h not being found, you need to install the mysql client source files, just like you did.
01/02/2010 - 07:39
Hello,
I like to forward all bounced emails for all of my user accounts to a single account.
is there a qmail setting or patch that allows me to forwards all bounced emails of my user accounts to a single admin account?
Regards