| 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. |