Q Mail

The Qmail license does not allow for binary distribution. So we need to compile from source to install qmail. This works out well as we will be applying a few patches to the source. Also, since we are adding TLS support, you will need to ensure that the openssl-devel package is installed.

The qmail-spp patch provided above may not be included in the normal qmail-spp distribution. This version is patched against netqmail 1.05 with the smtp-auth tls patch. I have provided a link to the qmail-spp homepage for further information regarding qmail-spp.

First add the qmail users.

Note : The uid and gid numbers I've indicated below are my preference. There is no "standard" for this that I have been able to find. My standard is here. If you are creating a Qmail cluster, do yourself a favor and make sure the uid/gid's are the same across all of the servers. This will save you from some VERY large headaches, I promise.

rootshell> mkdir /var/qmail

rootshell> groupadd -g 310 nofiles

rootshell> useradd -g nofiles -d /var/qmail/alias -u 312 alias

rootshell> useradd -g nofiles -d /var/qmail -u 313 qmaild

rootshell> useradd -g nofiles -d /var/qmail -u 314 qmaill

rootshell> useradd -g nofiles -d /var/qmail -u 315 qmailp

rootshell> groupadd -g 311 qmail

rootshell> useradd -g qmail -d /var/qmail -u 316 qmailq

rootshell> useradd -g qmail -d /var/qmail -u 317 qmailr

rootshell> useradd -g qmail -d /var/qmail -u 318 qmails

Now that the users have been created, we need to uncompress, patch, and install Qmail. We recommend compiling all of your source in a central directory. We use /usr/local/src for our central directory.

shell> cd /usr/local/src

shell> tar zxvf netqmail-1.06.tar.gz

shell> tar zxvf qmail-spp-0.42.tar.gz

shell> cd netqmail-1.06

shell> patch -p0 < /path/to/netqmail-1.05-tls-smtpauth-20070417.patch

shell> patch -p0 < /path/to/qmail-spp-0.42-smtpauth-tls-20060105.patch

shell> make

The update_tmprsadh script creates temporary ssl certificates. These certificates are used for ssl authentication and need to be readable by qmail, pop3, and imap. By default, the certificates are owned by qmaild, so we need to change the ownership to vpopmail. The following command updates the necessary script.

shell> cat update_tmprsadh | sed s/qmaild\.qmail/vpopmail\.qmail/m > update_tmprsadh.tmp

shell> mv update_tmprsadh.tmp update_tmprsadh

shell> chmod 755 update_tmprsadh

Note for Redhat Users : If you get an excess of openssl errors when compiling, edit the conf-cc file and add -I/usr/kerberos/include at the end of the first line.

rootshell> make setup check

Replace hostname below with the full hostname of your server

rootshell> ./config-fast hostname

rootshell> make cert

rootshell> chown vpopmail.qmail /var/qmail/control/servercert.pem

Note : This next step may take a while

rootshell> make tmprsadh

That's all that needs to be done to install qmail. However, there is a bit of configuration to be done. See the configuration section for more information.

Page last modified on November 18, 2010, at 03:23 AM