nightmaremail

Unnamed repository; edit this file 'description' to name the repository.
Log | Files | Refs

INSTALL.vsm.md (1836B)


      1 UNIX has traditionally delivered mail into a central spool directory,
      2 /var/spool/mail. (The original name was /usr/spool/mail; some systems
      3 now use /var/mail.) There are two basic problems with /var/spool/mail:
      4 
      5 * It's slow. On systems with thousands of users, /var/spool/mail has
      6   thousands of entries. A few UNIX systems support fast operations on
      7   large directories, but most don't.
      8 
      9 * It's insecure. Writing code that works safely in a world-writable
     10   directory is not easy. See, for example, CERT advisory 95:02.
     11 
     12 These may not be problems at your site, so you may want to leave your
     13 mailboxes in /var/spool/mail.
     14 
     15 This file explains several ways that you can configure qmail to use
     16 existing /var/spool/mail delivery tools. Please note that I do not vouch
     17 for the security or reliability of any of those tools.
     18 
     19 
     20 1. What to configure
     21 
     22 The qmail system is started from /var/qmail/rc with
     23 
     24    `qmail-start ./Mailbox splogger qmail`
     25 
     26 The first argument to qmail-start, ./Mailbox, is the default delivery
     27 instruction. You can change it to run a program such as binmail or
     28 procmail. (See dot-qmail.0 for the format of delivery instructions.)
     29 
     30 
     31 2. Using procmail
     32 
     33 You may already have installed procmail for mail filtering. procmail
     34 delivers to /var/spool/mail by default.
     35 
     36 To set up qmail to use procmail, simply copy /var/qmail/boot/proc to
     37 /var/qmail/rc.
     38 
     39 Note that procmail must be in your system's boot PATH; if it isn't, you
     40 will have edit /var/qmail/rc to include the full path.
     41 
     42 
     43 3. Using sendmail's delivery agent
     44 
     45 sendmail uses binmail to deliver to /var/spool/mail. binmail is shipped
     46 with the operating system as /bin/mail or /usr/libexec/mail.local.
     47 
     48 There is some variation in binmail syntax among systems. The most common
     49 interfaces are shown in /var/qmail/boot/binm1, /var/qmail/boot/binm2,
     50 and /var/qmail/boot/binm3.