Installing Qmail

For various licencing reasons, plus the fact that Qmail hasn't been updated by its author for a while, the best procedure to build and install Qmail is to start with the netqmail package (which is Qmail plus third-party fixes) and build from source. The process of getting a Qmail system up and running is rather tedious (particularly if you use Dan Bernstein's daemon and TCP wrapping packages), but well documented on Dave Sill's Life with Qmail site.

Follow the installation instructions verbatim, and do not lose that packet of little screws. There are one or two things which don't quite work out, and one or two points worth emphasising, so I note them here.

As well as netqmail package (currently at version 1.05), we build and install daemontools 0.76 (a set of tools for running UNIX services, a la inetd) and ucspi-tcp 0.88 (a set of command-line tools for assembling and running TCP/IP server applications).

Notes:

• The packages are best configured and compiled as root, since the compilation and installation are usually done in the same step. However I don't bother with the particular source directories mentioned; building in root's home directory works fine, and the location of the build directories doesn't actually matter.
• We are targetting Maildir as the format for mail everywhere, so our defaultdelivery file contains "~/Maildir/". This needs to be created (with maildirmake) for all users who want to receive mail, and who are not making their own arrangements via procmail.
• The Qmail loggers don't work if you follow the instructions: for some reason, the symbolic links created for daemontools don't work. (This is on several varieties of Linux.) Just copy the files from ~/admin/daemontools-XXX/command/ to /command/.
• Do fetch and run the inst_check shell script to check your installation - it will find things that need snagging by hand.

Now it's probably time for Running Procmail.