qmail news

  • new 2007/05/30 Andrew Richards has written NORCPTHOSTS, which mandates authentication for relaying hosts. The sender must authenticate before sending _any_ mail (including to rcpthosts listed domains), regardless of the content of control/rcpthosts[.cdb]. It's enabled by an environment variable.
  • new 2007/05/07 Sam Clippinger has written a filter for qmail that blocks spam at connection-time, called spamdyke It's similar to DJB's rblsmtpd but it provides a lot more features than rblsmtpd, including blacklisting, graylisting, limiting numbers of recipients, checking rDNS entries, checking DNS RBLs, vastly superior logging and more. spamdyke supports SMTP AUTH and TLS, and will even provide SMTP AUTH to unpatched qmail installations! Recompiling qmail is not necessary to use spamdyke.
  • new 2007/05/04 Georg Lehner has made qmailanalog better integrated with multilog.
  • new 2007/04/23 Traian Zvirid has additional restrictions on top of Krzysztof's SMTP-AUTH patch.
  • new 2007/04/21 Lukas Feiler has merged several patches into his bigqmail patch.
  • new 2007/02/27 Frederik Vermeulen got tired of his users sending oversize attachments, so he wrote an experimental patch that provides a qmail-queue replacement that detaches large attachments from an email and replaces them by an URL where the attached files can be downloaded (to avoid large attachments being sent over the internet via email).
  • new 2007/02/15 Mark Steele wrote up some notes on Setting up a Qmail front-end for M$ Exchange server
  • new 2007/02/08 Thomas Mangin's qmail-ldap-multi-auth patch allows you to run a mix of qmail-ldap and vmailmgr domains on the same machine.
  • new 2007/02/08 Thomas Mangin's qmail-remote-user-verification patch performs user verification against both qmail-ldap and vmailmgr to bounce mail. It does not bounce mail during conversation but at qmail-queue (changing this is trivial tho), so it will not save you bandwidth but only cpu if you scan emails.
  • new 2006/12/22 Felipe Costa has written a book for qmail in Brazil-Portuguese.
  • updated 2006/12/17 Marcelo Coelho has written a patch for SRS. More info on SRS. SRS and SPF work together.
  • new 2006/12/17 Krzysztof Marciniak has written a qmail book in Polish entitled "qmail. Szybki i wydajny serwer pocztowy".
  • new 2006/12/15 Antonio Casado Rodríguez created mdsmon (MailDirSize Monitor)
  • new 2006/12/11 EZIX has a NoRelaySMTP, which writes email directly into a user's Maildir.
  • new 2006/11/08 Russ Nelson suggests a method for stopping qmail reliably. When you need to stop qmail to do something, do it like this: 
    svc -d /service/qmail-s*
# wait for qmail-send to exit.
setlock /service/qmail/supervise/lock sh -c (
    # do stuff here
    svc -u /service/qmail-s*
)
  • updated 2006/10/23 Balazs Nagy has a concurrent IP connection limiter for ucspi-tcp. Tomislav Randjic has ported that patch to both ucspi-ssl and ucspi-tls.
  • new 2006/09/30 Richard Lyons wants to sign messages using domainkeys after verh has modified the message, so he added code to qmail-remote to [re]sign the message.
  • new 2006/09/02 Folkert van Heusden wrote multitail, which monitors multiple logfiles. MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses).
  • new 2006/09/01 Skaarup has written a package for analyzing logfiles for a lot of Dan's tools.
  • 2006/06/06 Russ Nelson wrote the selfhelo patch, which causes qmail-smtpd to reject email sent using a HELO hostname equal to your IP address, your hostname, or any hostname without dots.
  • 2006/05/26 Niki Denev wrote qstat-gid. It prints info about the messages in the qmail queue sorted per GID. He uses it to quickly see if any user sends excessive amounts of mail/spam and fills the queue.
  • 2006/05/24 Jon Lewis has an SMTP banner delay program. This causes SMTP clients which give up early, or start pipelining too soon, to have their connections rejected. Typically these clients are sources of spam.
  • 2006/04/24 Thomas Mangin has a greylisting solution in Python.
  • 2006/04/06 Lukas Feiler has instructions for installing qmail with TLS and SMTP auth,... Courier-IMAP/POP3, MySQL, Clam AV, SpamAssassin - all with virtual domain support.
  • 2006/02/15 William Baxter wrote ucspi-ssl which uses OpenSSL to encrypt connections.
  • updated 2005/07/13 EnderUNIX has updated qsheff, a qmail-queue replacement to filter mail traffic and more. It supports body filtering, subject filtering, attachment filtering, quarantine, white/black list, single line logging for qmail and many features.
  • 2005/04/27 Alberto Brealey-Guzman also has an outgoing IP address patch, but his uses a control file to do the mapping.
  • 2004/11/27 Sulamita Garcia wrote some Portugese qmail documentation. It descries how to run Qmail + vpopmail + squirrelmail + courierImap + qmailAdmin + SMTP-Qmail-auth + RBLSMTP.
  • 2004/11/07 Nikola Vladov has devised a way to link qmail against djbdns's resolver library.
  • 2004/10/28 Paul Jarc's realrcptto patch changes qmail-smtpd so it uses the same tests as qmail-send to choose a .qmail file. The email might still be bounced by the .qmail file, but if it would bounce because there is no applicable .qmail file, then the email is rejected in the smtp dialog.
  • 2004/10/28 qscanq, by Len Budney. Qscanq provides a virus-scanning wrapper for qmail. Qscanq scans every email message submitted to qmail before allowing it to be added to qmail's mail queue. Infected emails are rejected, not bounced, so you won't have to deal with double-bounces during virus outbreaks.
  • 2004/10/18 Russ Nelson wrote qmail-dk, which is a qmail-queue replacement that signs and verifies DomainKeys signatures.
  • 2004/10/11
  • 2004/10/10 Sumanth NS has a qmail + UUCP how-to.
  • updated 2004/09/13 Luca Morettoni wrote qmail-rblchk, which checks the IP address in the Received: line of an email message on stdin against named DNSBLs.
  • updated 2004/09/12 Daniele Ripanti and Marco Rocchetti have written a HOWTO in Italian describing a qmail installation on FreeBSD with POP3, IMAP, Mailing list, Antivirus, Antispam support and webmail.
  • 2004/09/06 Jeremy Kister wrote a qmail-queue manipulation tool.
  • 2004/07/12 Dion Sasmito wrote a goodmailfrom matching badmailfrom's functionality.
  • 2004/07/12 Pawel Foremski has a qmail-smtpd plugin system.
  • 2004/06/30 N. Ersen Siseci wrote Zabit, a C-language qmail content filter.
  • 2004/06/27 ezmlm-showctl prints out the ezmlm configuration in a readable manner.
  • 2004/06/07 Oliver Neubauer has a validrcptto patch, which rejects invalid addresses in the SMTP dialog. Note that you cannot use this if you have any .qmail files ending in -default, e.g. any ezmlm lists.
  • 2004/06/01 Markus Stumpf has a patch for qmail-smtpd that rejects W32/Sober-G at the SMTP level.
  • 2004/06/01 Jay Soffian has modified qmail-smtpd to fork/exec $RCPTCHECK at the RCPT TO:. $RCPTCHECK is run in the same environment as qmail-smtpd. Additionally $SENDER is set to the envelope from and $RECIPIENT is set to the envelope recipient (for the current rcpt to:). Based on the return code (exit value) of $RCPTCHECK, the rcpt to: address will either be accepted or rejected.
  • updated 2004/05/28 Nagy Balazs wrote a patch to ensure that the domain name on the envelope sender is a valid DNS name. This is not terribly effective against spammers, but I list it here because some people want it.
  • 2004/05/10 Larry M. Smith has written instructions for using qmail as a honeypot.
  • 2004/04/11 John R Levine has written a SMTP AUTH patch for ofmipd in mess822-0.58.
  • updated 2004/03/29 qregex provides full regexp matching on envelope addresses.With REs (Regular Expresions) it becomes quite easy to filter out email addresses that contain invalid characters or simply aren't a real address. Andrew St. Jean has added case insensitive pattern matching and logging when a match is found.
  • 2004/03/28 John Levine has written the O'Reilly & Associates "owl" book on qmail (owls eat bats). More information on the book is available on John's page. 2004/03/27 David Jonas has a patch to rblsmtpd to let you ignore certain A record responses from the bl lookup.
  • 2004/03/16 Erwin Hoffmann suggests a one-line fix to the errno compilation problem. It works for most DJB software: 
    cat error.h | sed -es/^extern\ int\ errno\;/#include\ \<errno.h\>/ >error.h
    Or, djb suggests that you edit conf-cc to read: 
    cc -O2 -include /usr/include/errno.h
  • 2004/03/16 Tino Reichardt has a qpasswd checkpassword.
  • updated 2004/03/05 John Wiggins has a C/C++ CGI program for the control of qmail.
  • 2004/02/04 Christophe Saout wrote a SPF checker that runs inside qmail-smtpd and is written using the native dns and string functions that come with qmail.
  • 2004/02/02 Adam Aube's block_file.pl rejects messages using file name and/or MIME type patterns.
  • updated 2004/01/28 Russell Nelson has an antivirus patch for qmail-smtpd, with some contributions from Charles Cazabon.

    updated 2004/01/27 Charles Cazabon, Dave Sill, Henning Brauer, Peter Samuel, and Russell Nelson have put together a netqmail-1.05 distribution of qmail. It is comprised of qmail-1.03 plus the recommended patches, some documentation, and a shell script which prepares the files for compilation.

  • updated 2004/01/13 Frederik Vermeulen has written a patch implementing RFC2487 (starttls) in qmail (qmail-smtpd as server, qmail-remote as client). This means you can get SSL or TLS encrypted and authenticated SMTP between the MTAs and between MTA and an MUA like Netscape4.5.
  • 2004/01/09 Philip Gladstone wrote a delivery-time SPF checker. More on SPF.
  • 2004/01/02 Jean-Eudes ONFRAY wrote a rhsbl patch for tcpserver. This lets you block or whitelist email based on the reverse-DNS hostname rather than IP.
  • 2003/12/20 Dr. Erwin Hoffmann has written his own SMTP Auth package.
  • 2003/12/20 Erwin Hoffman's SPAMCONTROL combines many spam control features. Includes SMTP Auth with CRAM-MD5 support.
  • 2003/12/09 Erwin Hoffmann has compiled a tutorial about SMTP Authentication (as part of my canceled Qmail Book) which is available in english language. Readers will find an updated version of Krysztof Dabrowski's SMTP Auth patch which should cleanly interface with eg. netqmail-1.04.
  • 2003/12/03 Chris Johnson wrote qdated to create and verify timestamped e-mail addresses. These addresses expire after a user-configurable period of time; any mail sent to an expired address will bounce.
  • 2003/11/05 Courierpasswd allows users to to check and change their passwords using Courier authentication modules. It can optionally read authentication tokens from stdin and send logging information to syslog or stderr.
  • 2003/11/02 Roberto Lacava has Italian installation instructions for qmail on Red Hat 9.
  • 2003/10/28 Matthew Trout checks SMTP clients to see if they are open relays before he will accept email from them.
  • 2003/10/17 Alex Greg likes to see the output of svstat expressed in dhms instead of seconds.
  • 2003/10/10 Ian Stewart wrote qmail-logfilter, which discards the DATA phase of an smtp session.
  • 2003/10/09 Erwin Hoffmann wrote QMVC - Qmail Mail and Virus Control is an unidirectional Mail Filter and Virus Scanner for Qmail. It runs from your .qmail file.
  • 2003/10/07 Oliver Hitz wrote a small tool to manually test SMTP-AUTH CRAM-MD5 authentication.
  • 2003/10/07 Oliver Hitz authenticates against a CDB file and works for SMTP-AUTH as well as for Courier POP and IMAP.
  • 2003/10/06 Michael Devogelaere's qmail-sql now includes ODBC support.
  • 2003/09/19 Mark Willcox wrote postpop, which is a simpler SMTP after POP solution.
  • 2003/09/05 Russ Nelson discards doublebounces without queuing them with his doublebounce-trim patch.
  • 2003/09/03 Jeffrey Clement wrote a time-limited email-address program called datedmail.
  • 2003/09/01 Paul Gregg rejects HELO commands whose parameter has no dot.
  • 2003/08/26 Ricardo Oliveira and Mario Gamito have written a qmail book in Portuguese entitled "Como instalar um servidor completo de email".
  • 2003/07/24 Adam Aube's chkpass.pl authenticates using a Squid auth helper program.
  • 2003/07/24 Insist that your local users use only certain domain names on their outgoing email.
  • 2003/07/08 F-Prot supports use of the Anomy sanitizer with qmail.
  • 2003/06/12 Sylvestre Ledru wrote some bits on using spam assassin with qmail.
  • 2003/05/29 Florian Schiessl points out his Qmail, vpopmail, qmailadmin, ... Howto for Debian woody.
  • 2003/05/28 Samuel Prakoso and Tomy and Onno Purbo have written a qmail book in Indonesian.
  • 2003/05/17 David Phillips noticed that qmail's sendmail's -f emulation doesn't set the default for the username as sendmail does.
  • 2003/05/16 Erwin Hoffmann is writing a book in German on qmail, called Qmail&co. Unfortunately, the book has been cancelled by the publisher.
  • 2003/05/13 J. de Boyne Pollard suggests that you remove the bodge that works around a BIND version 4 problem
  • 2003/05/13 Erwin Hoffmann wrote Newanalyse, helping the sysadmin in processing multilog logfiles.
  • 2003/05/07 qmail ought to recognize 0.0.0.0 as a local IP address. This patch from Scott Gifford implements that change.
  • 2003/05/07 Scott Gifford's moreipme patch is available. This solves the problem seen when a host has more IP addresses than it knows about. This happens in particular when you have an IP masquerading load balancer in front of a host.
  • 2003/05/02 Jeffrey Clement wrote up a Debian HOWTO on setting up qmail, Vmailmgr, CourierIMAP, SpamAssassin, and ezmlm.
  • 2003/05/01 Frank Niedermann has written a HowTo install qmail on Debian in German language.
  • 2003/04/10 John Levine wrote a badrcptto patch which uses CDB and logging.
  • 2003/04/09 Andreas Mueller has compiled qmail for HP-UX.
  • 2003/04/08 Inter7 has their own MRTG configuration
  • 2003/04/07 Asfihani has written Installing Qmail With vmailmgr and vpopmail in Indonesian language. He also covers omail admin, courier-imap and squirrelmail.
  • 2003/03/23 Will Harris has a patch to make qmail fully RFC 1870 compliant, i.e. to support the ESMTP SIZE command. Erwin Hoffman has some corrections.
  • 2003/03/20 Kris Kelley has Gentoo installation instructions.
  • 2003/03/17 Qmail-popup redirects stderr to stdout, thus making it impossible to write a wrapper around qmail-pop3d which writes to the logfile by writing to stderr. Being a little cleverer with the shell, you can also redirect FD 7 onto stdout like this:
  • 2003/03/13 Jan Knepper has a qmail virtual domain outgoing IP address patch, based on IP adddress.
  • 2003/03/09 Ingo Rohloff has added SMTP authentication support to serialsmtp..
  • 2003/03/09 Richard Lyons points out that multilog has filtering capabilities, see http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/multilog.html. If you leave recordio in place you can select what bits of the output to write. For example:
  • 2003/03/05 Bruce Guenter updated his autoresponder based on Eric's design.
  • 2003/02/25 Mário Gamito has some Portuguese documentation.
  • 2003/02/18 Georg Lehner tells how to configure Qmail with Spamassassin.
  • 2003/02/17 Johan Almqvist logs badmailfrom hits.
  • 2003/02/11 Chandrashelkhar Joshi is running courier-imap under daemontools.
  • 2003/02/04 Andreas Aardal Hanssen has written Binc IMAP. It's invoked just like qmail-pop3d so it fits in smoothely in a vanilla qmail system. Works fine with vhkpwd or any checkpassword-compatible authenticators.
  • 2003/01/29 Net::QMTP - This perl module implements an object oriented interface to a Quick Mail Transfer Protocol (QMTP) client which enables a perl program to send email by QMTP.
  • 2003/01/29 q-sorter sorts your email into separate inboxes.
  • 2003/01/13 Erik Sjölund pointed out this bug in qmail-local.
  • 2003/01/12 The definitions of errno in qmail (and tcpserver) do not work with the newest glibc (2.3.1). Debian and redhat are updating to this glibc. Executables compiled with older glibc's (2.3) abort on startup, and recompilation with 2.3.1 is not possible. Mate Wierdl has patches for all of djb's software. Erwin Hoffmann points out that a one-line sed script will fix most of DJB's software. Look in the Tips section.
  • 2003/01/08 Larry Engleman has a Qt GUI installer
  • 2002/12/31 Dale Woolridge, James Law, and Moto Kawasaki's spam throttle patch provides a method to rate limit/stutter spam (message throughput) via a highly parameterized control interface. As of release 2.01, tcpserver is no longer a strict requirement.
  • 2002/12/26 Rene Schleicher has written a qmail/vpopmail-Installation HOWTO in German.
  • 2002/12/17 Andrew St. Jean describes his qmail configuration and using qmail's null client, Courier IMAP, and TMDA.
  • 2002/12/05 LinuxMagic is porting their Anti-Spam/Valid User checking program, magic-smtpd, a drop-in replacement for qmail-smtpd over to opensource. Features checking for Valid Users, Spam conditions, and smtpd RCPT-TO rate limiting, all at the smtpd level to reduce server loads before it hits the queue. Supports stock qmail, qmail/vpopmail, and LinuxMagic Mailserver installs.
  • 2002/11/29 Plácido Revilla wrote a checkpassword that authentifies against a PHPNuke users database. This allows administrators of these kind of portals to automatize the creation of pop3 accounts in their system.
  • 2002/11/06 Miguel Beccari has QmailToaster RPM packages. Features: Mail Server (pop3, pop3-ssl, imap4, imap-ssl, smtp, smtp-ssl), Web Administration Tools (vpopmail, vqadmin), Web Mail Client (horde), Mailing lists(ezmlm), Autoresponder, Antispam.
  • 2002/10/30 Ciprian has three benchmark articles comparing sendmail, qmail, and PostFix.
  • 2002/10/19 David Phillips has a checkpassword which authenticates via a pop3 connection. While this may seem counter-productive, you can use it for smtp-auth where the smtp server does not have direct access to the user database.
  • 2002/10/09 Han Boetes blocks sites with no reverse dns. He uses the following tcp.smtp file. The only thing I would do differently is to set RBLSMTPD instead of just denying the connection.
  • 2002/09/25 James Raftery wants the canonicalized hostname in the logfile, so he can see the real envelope recipients of messages after host name canonicalization. If you send a mail to me at lecter@www.redbroock.dcu.ie, your logs will show 'to remote lecter@www.redbrook.dcu.ie' but qmail-remote will actually use 'lecter@prodigy.redbrook.dcu.ie' in the RCPT TO command.
  • 2002/09/24 Roger Merchberger has some techniques to deal with double-bouncing email.
  • 2002/09/23 Eric M. Johnston's YAQSAP (Yet Another qmail SMTP AUTH Patch).
  • 2002/08/05 Gerrit Pape wrote qconfirm, a delivery confirmation process for a mail address.
  • 2002/08/05 Adrian Ho has increased 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.
  • 2002/07/29 Giacomo Cariello has OpenBSD Qmail Ports, even though Theo has removed them from portstree.
  • 2002/07/16 Bjoern Kalkbrenner has improved the smtp-auth client patch (alternate location) so it works with multiple users. This is of most use for a desktop qmail installation which needs to relay mail through a server that requires authentication. The original author was Jay Soffian (documentation, patch). Last person to touch that patch was Robert Sanders
  • 2002/07/10 Marco Tizzoni has translated Life With Qmail into Italian.
  • 2002/07/09 Paul Niewiadomski has translated man pages into Polish. Actually, he's Paweł Niewiadomski, but you need an 8859-2 character set to properly render his name. I can't wait for UTF-8 to be supported everywhere.
  • 2002/07/09 Michel Morelli is running an Italian-language list.
  • 2002/06/21 Central Command's Vexira Antivirus For Mail Servers(aka VAMS+I for the Integrated version) has qmail support.
  • 2002/06/18 Reza Gamal has written a qmail & vpopmail installation guide in Indonesian.
  • 2002/06/18 Tim Deegan has an RFC1339 remote mail check daemon that works with Maildir mailboxes.
  • 2002/06/04 Ronald C. Rivera creates home directories and moves email directly from an LDIF file. It also creates the user's public_html directory which can be used in conjunction with mod_ldap_userdir.
  • 2002/06/04 Len Budney wrote a little C program called safecat, which implements DJB's maildir algorithm to copy stdin to a file in a maildir. When exit codes are checked, as by qmail-local or fetchmail with -w option, it should be as reliable as qmail's own maildir delivery (which heavily influenced the safecat).
  • 2002/05/27 There's also the qmail-verh patch. This allows substitution of the recipient local/host parts into the message. Useful for inserting a customized mailto: URL for list-unsubscribe into the body of the message. Bernhard Graf has a fix for input buffer boundary problems.
  • 2002/05/25 Andreas Aardal Hanssen has a way to run multiple checkpasswords and authenticate against one, and if that fails, then the other. If none succeed, it returns failure.
  • 2003/02/22 André Oppermann updated his ext-todo patch, which solves the 'silly qmail syndrome'. That's where qmail spends more time processing incoming email than scheduling deliveries. You can get it with big-todo integrated as well.
  • 2002/05/01 David Phillips noticed that sendmail's -f option sets a default From: header, and so should qmail's emulation.
  • 2002/05/01 Alexey Mahotkin rewrote checkpassword-pam from scratch.
  • 2002/04/23 Justin Hopper has a quota implementation for QmailAdmin.
  • 2002/04/11 Noel Mistula wrote checkhab, which checks for HTML, attachments, and binaries in email, and blocks them.
  • 2002/03/25 James Grinter has instructions on using SpamAssassin. It's a script that runs from a .qmail file.
  • 2002/03/18 Sergiusz Pawlowicz wrote ezmlm-cgi-py, a more approachable (i.e. Python, not djb-C) version of "the Freds" ezmlm-cgi archive formatter.
  • 2002/02/09 Russell Nelson has a patch to reject relay probes generated by so-called anti-spammers. These relay probes have '!', '%' and '@' in the local (username) part of the address.
  • 2002/02/06 EnderUNIX Team wrote spamGuard, which scans your log files for "too much" email from a particular user, and adds them to badmailfrom.
  • 2002/02/05 Mark Delany wrote set_supplementary_groups, which lets you gain group permissions for the groups you are in in /etc/group. In particularly mailman requires this.
  • 2002/01/23 OdeiaVir integrates virus scanning into qmail.
  • 2002/01/11 Bruce Guenter wrote mailfront, a package containing customizeable network front-ends for mail servers; specifically SMTP and POP3. Supports SMTP auth and POP3 AUTH PLAIN and LOGIN.
  • 2002/01/08 Wolfgang Pichler wanted graphs from logs, so he wrote qmailalizer.
  • 2001/12/20 Michele Beltrame has a tool to view the qmail queue (with colored display), view messages in it and delete messages. It's very simple and written in Perl.
  • 2001/12/14 Mark Delaney noted that he was getting spam with a null envelope sender. That by itself is insufficient reason to reject the email. However, when the spam has multiple envelope recipients, it cannot be a bounce message. So, Charles Cazabon wrote a patch to enforce single recipients on bounces.
  • 2001/12/09 The ultimate mbox2maildir has not yet been invented. However, Robin Whittle has created another mbox2maildir. This one can do entire directories of mboxes.
  • 2001/11/24 Andrew Richards has a checkpassword that wraps around Courier-IMAP's authentication for use by qmail-pop3d.
  • 2001/11/16 Looking for information on how to add a disclaimer to your outgoing email?
  • 2001/11/13 Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote qpsmtpd, a smtp server with filtering tools. It's written in perl.
  • 2001/11/13 O'Shaughnessy Evans has a set of shell scripts that comprise a spam-filtering system called "spamrule".
  • 2001/11/06 Jay Austad has his qmqpc rotating the server list by a random amount. This distributes the load over multiple qmqp servers.
  • 2001/06/25 Martin Östlund has written a Swedish qmail-howto.
  • 2001/05/31 Scott Woods has qmail running on a Cray. It took some patching to make it run on UNICOS, but it's running.
  • 2001/05/31 Qmail-VmailMgr-Courier-SquirrelMail installation guide, written by Konstantin Riabitsev.
  • 2001/05/31 Ismail Yenigul has written a Turkish qmail-howto.
  • 2001/05/29 Peter van Dijk suggests that you have two services running smtpd, one using recordio and the other not. He says that it's a great diagnostic tool. Create /service/qmail-smtpd as you would normally. Create /service/qmail-smtpd-recordio as a copy with recordio inserted, and logging to a separate space (be sure to chmod this logdir tight because recordio records complete emails). Create /service/qmail-smtpd-recordio/down. The switchover is then simply: 
    # svc -u /service/qmail-smtpd-recordio ; svc -d /var/service/qmail-smtpd
    and viceversa.
  • 2001/05/22 iGENUS is a chinese webmail system for perl + qmail + vpopmail + mysql.
  • 2001/05/06 oMail-webmail is a simple Webmail solution for mail servers based on qmail and optionally vmailmgr. This a GPL project, maintained by Olivier Müller. The mails are read directly from Maildirs on the harddisk, which is much quicker than using protocols like POP3 or IMAP. Other features includes multiple language support (currently English, French, German and Italian), folders and addressbook support. oMail is programmed in Perl. Developers and translators are welcome to subscribe to the devel mailing list.
  • 2001/04/27 Davide Giunchi wrote qmail-masq[uerade]. It will masquerade the internal address with an external one when sending email from local network users to the external internet users.
  • 2001/04/08 Gnus has had native maildir support since version 5.8. Also see nnmaildir.
  • 2001/04/06 Mahlon Smith has written a general new mail checker, useful if you use the mutt MUA and procmail to filter incoming mail to Maildirs, since there isn't a built in mechanism for doing this from within mutt.
  • 2001/04/06 Jesse Sweetland has added Postgres support to his checkpassword and qmail-getpw replacements. He calls the package sql-xpw. These differ from Takeshi's code because his is a patch to qmail and this code is not.
  • 2001/02/26 Klaus Reimer has code to change the appearance of bounce messages. Note that this has the potential to break QSBMF.
  • 2001/02/09 And similarly Sean Cody has a maildir patch for pine 4.33.
  • 2001/02/06 Larry M. Smith has a vanilla checkpassword.pl.
  • 2001/02/05 Andrew Richards has a checkpassword for Radius, written in C. It's based around Dan's checkpassword, and uses the Radius client library from FreeBSD, as well as MD5, since that's how Radius encodes its data.
  • 2001/01/22 Oliver Lehmann has written a German FreeBSD qmail-howto. Steven Fettig has translated Chapters 1-4 into English.
  • 2001/01/20 Shinya Ohira fixed a security lapse in checkpw, which gets its password from a file in the user's home directory, and allows both POP and APOP authentication. Magnus Bodin has a copy if that site happens to be unavailable.
  • 2001/01/19 Alex Kramarov has created qmail-print-queue to print the qmail queue contents - it runs on all messages and displayes the from:, to: and date: headers; can also dump the full header of the message if ran with "-h" switch (if mess822 is properly installed). It is useful in conjunction with monitoring tools like qmail-mrtg and others.
  • 2001/01/19 Vmailadmin is a web application that allow your client to administer the pop accounts in his domain, easily and with security, without the need to contact ISP staff.
  • 2001/01/18 Exim has Maildir support in its appendfile transport. Not exactly new news, but worth mentioning.
  • 2001/01/17 nnmaildir is a maildir backend for Gnus.
  • 2001/01/17 Russ Nelson updated his changes to qmail-remote to send using QMTP. If you wish to receive mail via qmtp, run qmtpd.
  • 2001/01/15 Ismail Yenigul has a qmail log analyzer tool called IsoQlog.
  • 2001/01/14 Ward Vandewege wrote a patch to implement badrcptto, in the same vein as badmailfrom.
  • 2001/01/10 Russ Nelson has a qmtpd tarball for people using 0.70 or later daemontools with qmail. Just drop it into your /service directory, and five seconds later, you're running qmtpd. Don't forget to set your lowest MX priority to 12801, or all your deliveries will occur using SMTP. This is a companion to his qmail-remote patch.
  • 2001/01/10 Mail2DB -- Store incoming mail in a PostgreSQL database. Mail2DB is suitable for putting in a .qmail/.forward file and will archive e-mail to a SQL database. Currently, there is only the storage component. This was written because somone on a LUG list expressed interest in such a system, but he only knew PHP (which isn't an ideal language for calling from a .qmail file ;-). Hopefully a user interface will be forthcoming.
  • 2001/01/07 Davide Giunchi has written an Italian qmail HOWTO, this Italian language document explains how to install, configure and run qmail. This isn't a translation of the English "qmail howto" but is written from scratch.
  • 2001/01/05 Ariel Kirsman has written a checkpassword which authenticates using an NT domain. It is derived from code taken from squid.
  • 2000/12/28 [news] qmail news is also available as a news channel, and a Slashdot slashbox.
  • 2000/12/23 Michael Elkins has a tool to synchronize a maildir with a remote IMAP mailbox.
  • 2002/03/31 Chris Kennedy has written the BlackHole spam/virus filter.
  • 2001/03/17 Patrick contributes an xinetd configuration for qmail-pop3d.
  • 2000/12/30 Jay Soffian has a qmail-queue replacement to filter against DNS spamlists.. It uses Bruce Guenter's QMAILQUEUE patch. Matching email is not rejected, but instead an X-RBL: header is added, for filtering at the delivery layer.
  • 2000/12/27 The qmailanalog package analyzes qmail log files in various ways. Russ Allbery has written tai64nfrac, which converts the tai64n that daemontools-0.63 produces into the fractional seconds that qmailanalog expects. Peter Samuel has implemented the same idea as a patch to daemontools using Dan's coding style (Jay Soffian also wrote one substantially similar to Peter's). Finally (hopefully) John Levine went ahead and fixed qmailanalog to accept tai64n dates.

    2000/12/14 Bruce Guenter also has written ucspi-proxy. It passes data back and forth between two connections set up by a UCSPI server and a UCSPI client.

  • 2000/12/03 Jason Haar wrote Qmail-Scanner (also known as scan4virus), which scans all gatewayed Email for certain characteristics. It is typically used for its anti-virus protection functions, in which case it is used in conjunction with commercial virus scanners. but also enables a site to react to Email (at a server/site level) that contains specific strings in particular headers, or particular attachment filenames or types (e.g. *.VBS attachments).
  • 2000/11/08 Jon Rust wrote qrblcheck, which reads a message on stdin, grabs the IP address from the Received lines and checks it against five different DNS-based spamlists.
  • 2000/10/12 Todd Underwood has written Yet Another Mailbox to Mailbox Converter.
  • 2000/09/30 Kenji Rikitake reports that procmail-3.15 includes support of the maildir format with no patch. All you need to do is to add a slash to the mail folder names.
  • 2000/09/17 oMail-admin is a PHP4-based Web-administration solution for mail servers based on Dan Bernstein's qmail and Bruce Guenter's vmailmgr.
  • 2000/09/15 Dru Nelson has an incoming message filter
  • 2000/09/15 Dru Nelson has an administrator's program to remove queued mail that has a certain string in it.
  • 2000/09/14 Matthias Andree has a patch to Dan's checkpassword that allows checkpasswd to use an arbitrary base directory for finding Maildirs
  • 2000/09/14 Matthias Andree has a patch to allow qmail's sendmail wrapper to ignore the -N dsn option that sendmail has, for compatibility with MUAs that use the -N dsn switch (mutt can do)
  • 2000/08/27 Dag Wieers wants to see all messages that are delivered to his domain but were bounced because the user or alias does not exist. Since you cannot forward and pipe in the same dot-qmail he found the following solution to be his most simple option, .qmail-default:
  • 2000/08/12 Bruce Guenter wrote his own implementation of the mini-qmail idea, only his (nullmailer) has a queue for more reliablity. It supports SMTP and QMQP, so it's a drop-in replacement for qmail-qmqpc.
  • 2000/08/10 Russell Nelson and Magnus Bodin have conspired to write some scripts and documentation to throw information about qmail into mrtg.
  • 2000/08/10 Dan's rblsmtpd blocks spam using the RBL and other DNS-based lists. Because of the size of the RSS zone, they have removed the necessary TXT records that rblsmtpd relies on. Alan Curry has a patch to rblsmtpd to make it work with A records.

    2000/07/28 Gerrit Pape has written man pages for ucspi-tcp-0.88, daemontools-0.70, and daemontools-0.76 to complement Dan's online HTML documentation.

  • 2000/07/26 Bruce Guenter wrote qlogtools, a set of tools useful in analyzing or producing logs from qmail and other packages.
  • 2000/07/21 Philip Jacob wrote up some instructions on using checkpoppasswd to create virtual users on virtual hosts, accessing their mail via pop3.
  • 2000/07/21 Mikko Hänninen has a patch to Mutt which converts GMT dates in the header into local time.
  • 2000/07/20 Dave Kitabjian has some diagnostic suggestions for various qmail problems on his Q-Cards page.

    2000/07/18 Mirko Zeibig has an RPM with fastforward with a .qmail-default and a "standard" /etc/aliases-file in it.

  • 2000/07/18 Chris Dent wrote Qmail::Queue.pm.
  • 2000/07/18 The Clarkson University Unix Team has an xbiff and from.
  • 2000/06/22 Erwin Hoffmann was supposed to give a German-language QMAIL presentation at a congress of the German Unix User Group (GUUG) (http://www.guug.de). However, the whole congress was canceled thus the presentation is more or less "virtual".
  • 2000/06/21 A text-only biff by David Gerber.

    2000/06/19 Interestingly, William Baxter announced ucspi-ipc and Bruce Guenter announced ucspi-unix within two days of each other. Same idea, different implementations.

  • 2000/06/14 Jim Simmons points out that you can stop linuxconf from creating a potential security hole by removing the /usr/sbin/sendmail line from /usr/lib/linuxconf/redhat/perm. If you don't do this, linuxconf will change /var/qmail/bin/sendmail to running suid.
  • 2000/05/19 AMaViS is A Mail Virus Scanner.
  • 2000/05/19 Kaspersky Lab includes qmail support for their AVP anti-virus program.
  • 2000/04/18 William E. Baxter has released qtools, a suite of utilities for use in .qmail files. The tools support applying a filter to a message body, message head, or entire message; conditional delivery of a message to a Maildir; and configuration of simple autorepliers.
  • 2000/04/13 Russell Nelson has a program called no-alternative, which picks the text/plain part out of a MIME multipart/alternative message, and forwards it to $USER-alternative.
  • 2000/04/11 Sam Varshavchik has a local delivery agent called Maildrop that has a custom filtering language more readable than procmail's.
  • 2003/02/16 Chris Hardie has updated his qmail anti-spam howto.
  • 2000/02/23 takeshi@SoftAgency.co.jp wrote MySQL + QMAIL, including qmail-getpw-mysql and checkpassword-mysql, to look up users in a mysql database. Iain Patterson has improved on MySQL + QMAIL.
  • 2000/01/25 The prolific Bruce Guenter has written qmail-qfilter, which is a front end for qmail-queue that can send the body of the message through one or more filters, such as qmail-inject or new-inject.
  • 2000/01/14 Jeff Hayward has a patch to qmail-local (which arguably belongs down below in the patches section except that Paul Gregg's quota check was already here) which treats quota exceeded as a permanent error, bouncing the message back to the sender.
  • 2000/01/10 Vern Hart doesn't like a pile of .qmail files in his home directory. So he uses users/assign to put them into a subdirectory: 
    =vern:vern:2244:18:/home/vern:::
+vern-:vern:2244:18:/home/vern:s/::
    This puts .qmail in his home directory but everything else is in .qmails/. This changes ~/.qmail-foo to ~/.qmails/foo and really cleans up his home.
  • 2000/01/09 [Anand Buddhdev] wrote turnmail, modified by Russell Nelson for publication here, which wraps around qmail-pop3d and triggers a serialmail delivery to the connecting host whose user just authenticated themselves. Or, a Unix system can use fetchmail, getmail or an NT system pullmail.
  • 2000/01/08 qmail-lint-0.55 checks your qmail configuration for common problems. Prints warning or error messages to stdout.

    1999/12/26 Dan's updated FAQ is also available in other file formats, and in Spanish.

  • 1999/12/21 Jonathan Kamens has written a replacement for the Emacs "movemail" program, which understands how to read mail from a qmail-style maildir.
  • 1999/12/09 Jonathan I. Kamens has the latest and arguably the greatest entry in the Maildir-xbiff category. The comment at the top of the script explains why this one is better.
  • 1999/12/08 Bruce Guenter has a qmail RPM which automatically applies a number of patches found here and which comes with some scripts.
  • 1999/12/01 Peter Green has some code to Archive and process log files generated by qmail-send and qmail-smtpd.
  • 1999/12/01 Russell Nelson's qmail-popbull program lets you create bulletins which get added to a user's mailbox as they log in. Equivalent to an all-customers mailing list, but takes up much less resources, and lets you withdraw bulletins.
  • 1999/11/19 Tong has a PostgreSQL checkpassword.
  • 1999/11/17 Sam Varshavchik wrote a Maildir-only IMAP server called Courier IMAP.