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qmail

For general information about qmail, you should visit the qmail home page at qmail.org or one of its mirrors. From there, you'll find links to the best of anything having to do with qmail.

After feel pretty comfortable with what you find there, come back here and we'll give you some information we gathered from our personal experience as well as some additional tips to solve specific problems.

Installation

While there are several packages available for different distributions, we strongly urge you to do your first qmail installation using Dave Sill's Life with qmail. LWQ will walk you through a completely manual install process, from building the software and dependent components through configuration and installation to troubleshooting. As you move toward a working qmail using Dave's procedure, you'll acquire a wealth of knowledge about how qmail works -- information you will not get from installing a package. The evidence is readily apparent on the qmail mailing list -- the questions from posters who read and followed LWQ are not as obscure as those posted by package installers. It's much easier to ask the right question when you have a firm understanding of qmail's various components and configuration files (there are more than 25 of them). Knowing how to ask the right question is critical to getting the best answer in the least amount of time.

For more installation help, also check out the references below. They're invaluable not only for installation but for maintaining your qmail configuration.

Microsoft Exchange vs. qmail

We can't count the number of times we've heard someone ask the question "how can I replace Exchange with qmail?". The technical answer is "you can't"... at least not in the true sense.

qmail is a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) that knows how to accept email and either facilitate delivery to its final destination or bounce it. An MTA typically listens on a designated port for messages conforming to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and stores the messages in an inbox of one form or another.

Microsoft Exchange is groupware -- software that supports the online collaboration between people who share a common interest or goal. As a matter of fact, Microsoft Exchange 2000 does not have its own SMTP server; this is not obvious until you try to install Exchange on a host where IIS is not installed.

That said, qmail is an exceptional replacement for the part of Microsoft Exchange that delivers email. There are other Open Source solutions to replace Exchange features such as shared folders and calendars.

Migrating from Microsoft Exchange to qmail

One of the most useful features of qmail is its ability to intelligently deliver, forward or reject email based on the cumulative effect of system level and user level configuration parameters. This capability makes it very easy to migrage from Exchange to qmail using a phased approach that slowly shifts responsibility from the Exchange Server to the qmail server without any disruption in email service.

We chose to used the phased approach because of limited hardware. While this may not be appropriate in your case, it might still be a useful configuration for setting up a qmail solution for evaluation and testing.

Succeeding on the qmail mailing list

The fact that we felt it necessary to include this section should be your first warning. The qmail mailing list is high volume and the experts on the list are intolerant of ignorant questions. They're not there to tutor you or to do your research for you. They're also not there to help you figure out what you're trying to ask -- if you've read LWQ and used it to do your installation, you should be able to ask the right question and provide the right diagnostics the first time. The qmail experts are there to answer questions when you don't understand something you've read or when you haven't been able to find the information you're looking for after having exerted your best effort to find the answer in the FAQ, LWQ and the mailing list archives.

In addition to what's already been posted on the Internet, we have some additional tips. Please read them. We believe the mailing list newbie will find them useful for avoiding the most common mistakes and making the most of their mailing list experience.

Other References

Sill, Dave. The qmail Handbook. 2002. Apress, Berkeley. (ISBN: 1-893115-40-2)

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