Qmail Quickstarter

Install, Set Up and Run your own Email Server

This book is a quick starter for people who want to set up a mail server using qmail. It also discusses advanced features, like hosting multiple domains, in detail. By bringing together material that might take days to find online it will be a real timesaver for Sysadmins.

This book starts with setting up a qmail server and takes you through virtualization, filtering, and other advanced features like hosting multiple domains, mailing lists, and SSL Encryption. Finally, it discusses the log files and how to make qmail work faster.

Qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent. It is designed for typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts. Qmail is the second most common SMTP server on the Internet, and has by far the fastest growth of any SMTP server. Qmail's straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a message, once accepted into the system, will never be lost. Qmail also optionally supports maildir, a new, super-reliable user mailbox format.

What you will learn from this book

• Installing, configuring, and compiling qmail
  
  
• Getting emails in and out of the queue, along with storing, retrieving, and authenticating them
  
  
• Virtualisation of domains and user management, filtering spam, and other advanced features like SSL encryption and mailing lists

Chapter 1: Basic Qmail: This chapter explains compiling, installing, and configuring a basic qmail system. Finally, it shows the best practices for using qmail.

Chapter 2: Getting Email into the Queue: This chapter covers the ways of getting email into the on-disk queue. It also covers authentication and other mail protocols.

Chapter 3: Getting Email Out of the Queue: This chapter discusses delivering email both locally and remotely along with the various kinds of users that qmail supports.

Chapter 4: Storing and Retrieving Email: This chapter provides a comparative analysis of storage formats of qmail with respect to popular formats, reliability, and speed of storing and retrieving emails.

Chapter 5: Virtualization: This chapter explains a generic virtualization framework and its virtual domains where user management and popular solutions will be handled. In the last section, multiple installations and their pros and cons are explained.

Chapter 6: Filtering: As the name suggests, this chapter discusses blocking viruses and also preventing spam from getting out.

Chapter 7: Advanced: This chapter discusses advanced features like SSL Encryption and mailing lists.

Chapter 8: Administration, Optimizing, and Monitoring: This chapter discusses the log files, their format, and problems associated with them. Finally, there are tips to make your qmail faster.

Approach
This book gives practical examples that system administrators can use right away, but it also explains the basics behind every example clearly.

About the Author
Kyle Wheeler is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Having co-authored papers both nationally and internationally, he received an M.S.C.S.E. from Notre Dame in 2005 and expects to receive his doctorate in the field of scalable computing in 2008. As part of his PhD research, he interned at Sandia National Laboratories from 2006 through 2007. Kyle began setting up and maintaining qmail-based email servers working for NetSeats Inc. in 2000. Since then, his client base has expanded to include the Philadelphia chapter of Notre Dame Alumni, the Church of the Epiphany in the Archdiocese of Louisville, and several other groups, both large and small. He is also a frequent contributor to the qmail mailing list, which supports qmail users and administrators internationally.