Dave Sill has helped me kick start a Qmail Knowledge Base. There are
now 32 answers to 43 questions. Check it out at:
http://qmail.faqts.com
We need the help of the community to build this resource. Please
consider taking some time to share your knowledge. A good way to
do this may be through answering mailing list questions in the
knowledge base and then pointing readers at the solution.
Other communities, such as PHP (http://php.faqts.com) have found a
FAQTs Knowledge Base to be a great way to capture the knowledge of the
community in a permanent, categorized and searchable format. FAQTs
has complete version control, group editing facilities, full credit
for authors and email alerts.
WIN A PALM V! This month one lucky contributor will win a Palm. Every
contribution you make gives you an entry in the competition. The more
contributions you make, the more entries you receive. Read more here:
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Below are the qmail entries that have changed in the last 24 hours; new
and edited. Posting these to the list gives readers a chance to review
and check their answers that have been summarised into the knowledge
base.
Cheers,
Nathan
## New Entries #################################################
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What does qmail do if the same address appears multiple times in a message header?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1442
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Nathan Wallace
Dave Sill
qmail does what you tell it to do: no more, no less. Send a message
like:
From: me
To: you, you, you
blah blah blah
and "you" will recieve three copies. Three is number of copies "you"
will receive. No more, no less. Three shall be the number of the copies,
and the number of the copies shall be three. Four shalt thou not
recieve, and neither receive thou two, excepting that thou then goest on
to receive three...
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How can I quickly delete a lot of messages from the queue that are for a domain that
doesn't exist?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1443
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Nathan Wallace
Chris Johnson
Assuming portal.mdr.net is the bad domain, try this:
# echo '#' > ~alias/.qmail-baddomain-default
# echo portal.mdr.net:alias-baddomain >>
/var/qmail/control/virtualdomains
# echo portal.mdr.net:127.0.0.1 >> /var/qmail/control/smtproutes
Then run /var/qmail/bin/qmail-tcpok and send qmail-send a HUP and an
ALRM. All your queued mail for portal.mdr.net will get delivered by
SMTP to 127.0.0.1 and will be handled by
~alias/.qmail-baddomain-default. The single # in that file will cause
all the mail to be discarded.
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Are there any books available for qmail?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1444
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Nathan Wallace
Chris Johnson
There's no book, yet. A couple of guys on the list are working on one
though.
In the meantime, you might look at Dave Sill's excellent "Life with
qmail." It's at
http://Web.InfoAve.Net/~dsill/lwq.html
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Does qmail support VRFY user?
Why do I always get 252 when I use VRFY?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1445
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Nathan Wallace
Anand Buddhdev, Dave Sill
qmail doesn't implement VRFY because (1) qmail's modular design makes
it impractical, and (2) VRFY makes it easy to validate e-mail
addresses and local accounts--information that crackers and spammers
like.
It always returns "252 send some mail, i'll try my best" to clients who
attempt to use VRFY, whether the user exists or not.
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How can I modify the LWQ startup scripts to start and stop only smtpd?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1446
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Nathan Wallace
Dave Sill
Just add additional tags to the "case" statement, e.g.:
stop-smtpd)
echo -n "Stopping qmail-smtpd: "
svc -d /var/supervise/qmail/smtpd
echo "done."
;;
start-smtpd)
echo -n "Starting qmail-smtpd: "
svc -u /var/supervise/qmail/smtpd
echo "done."
;;
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How can I duplicate every incoming message to two different hosts?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1447
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Nathan Wallace
Greg Owen
I'm going off of memory here, but I think this should do it. Test
before using in production.
Put "domain.com" in rcpthosts, and put "domain.com:alias-domain" in
virtualdomains. This will ensure that you accept mail for domain.com,
and that when it arrives the ".qmail-domain" file for the "alias" user
will be used to determine delivery instructions.
In /var/qmail/alias/.qmail-domain-default, put the following two lines:
|forward "$DEFAULT"@production.domain.com
|forward "$DEFAULT"@development.domain.com
A second way to do it would be to set up QUEUE_EXTRA as described in
FAQ 8.2 and in ~alias/.qmail-log put the "|forward ..." line for the
development copy, then have an smtproutes entry that says
"domain.com:production.domain.com". This way doesn't gain you much, and
if you accept mail for other domains, then development will get a copy
of that too - probably not what you want.
## Edited Entries ##############################################
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Why can't I send mail to the superuser?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1136
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Dave Sill, Jason Granum
http://Web.InfoAve.Net/~dsill/lwq.html#root-delivery
#This is a security feature. By avoiding delivery to privileged users,
#qmail eliminates the danger of running processes from .qmail files as
#root or appending messages to system files.
If you need to receive the mail sent to a privileged user, you can
always set an alias up to send mail sent to root, etc, to another non-
privileged user account. This way you won't miss any potentially
importaint mail.
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If I have to, what is the best way to kill qmail-send?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1218
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Nathan Wallace
Anand Buddhdev
This is what you're supposed to do:
kill qmail-send (standard kill, not kill -9)
... it waits for it's qmail-remote children to finish ....
kill qmail-remotes (standard kill, not kill -9)
... now qmail-send will die on its own ...
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What files do I need to delete to remove a message from the queue?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1219
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Nathan Wallace
Anand Buddhdev
You must be careful when trying to mess around with qmail's queue
directly.
Generally, you want to remove
/var/qmail/queue/{info,mess,remote,local}/hash/#number
to completely remove a message, where #number is the message id number
and info, mess, etc are directories.
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Is there an equivalent of the unix "mail" program to read Maildir boxes?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1221
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Nathan Wallace
Dave Sill
Try using:
/var/qmail/bin/qail
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It looks like the timestamp from qmail is wrong, what's happening?
What timezone does qmail use for timestamping messages?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1222
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Nathan Wallace
Dave Sill
qmail logs using Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), not the local
timezone. This is a feature. There's no "fix".
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How can I fetch remote POP messages and inject them in the local server?
What is fetchmail used for?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1223
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Nathan Wallace
Magnus Bodin
fetchmail is a mail-retrieval and forwarding utility; it fetches mail
from remote mailservers and forwards it to your local (client) machine's
delivery system. The fetchmail utility can be run in a daemon mode to
repeatedly poll one or more systems at a specified interval.
Read more with:
man fetchmail
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Why do I have a "DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA" message?
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge-base/view.phtml/aid/1315
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Nathan Wallace
Mark Mentovai
That's a "feature" of Pine - it's a meta-message that lets Pine share
some information with University of Washington's IMAP and POP servers.
It's nothing more than a pain for most of the world.
In /usr/local/lib/pine.conf (the global equivalent of .pinerc, good for
the entire system), put:
feature-list=quell-folder-internal-msg
Incidentally, this is not really qmail-related at all.
