tech notes

One of my servers has recently died. When I installed the server around 7 years ago, qmail was a very trendy alternative to the “bad and insecure” sendmail, FreeBSD’s default MTA. Now, after a few years have passed, qmail is no longer so trendy and chicks don’t dig it as they used to… So while reinstalling the server I knew I had to choose something different than qmail. It’s not that I don’t like qmail anymore but after spending some time with postfix, especially after integrating it with things like clamav, dspam and other different extensions I think it’s just easier to manage. So the real reason was – i wanted all these nice toys I had with other postfix installations and I wanted them quickly and without all that hacking around and patching patches I would have to do with qmail.

Moving email accounts between qmail and postfix is not a hard task. They both support Maildir format so getting this part working was quick and painless. The only problem I had with moving this mail installation was what to do with my ezmlm based mailing list. So this is how to make qmail and postfix live happily under one roof.

Install all required ports

I installed these ports (my local versions in brackets, note that it’s a bit old installation now):

• mail/qmail (1.03_6)
• mail/qmail-contrib (0.1_1)
• mail/ezmlm-idx (0.40_4)
• mail/postfix (2.4.6,1)

Configure postfix

add qmail transport to master.cf:

qmail unix - n n - - pipe flags=R user=qmailq argv=/var/qmail/bin/sendmail ${recipient}

and in main.cf define transport configuration file with perl regex syntax:

transport_maps = pcre:/usr/local/etc/postfix/pcre_transport

now, add all your mailing lists to pcre_transport file so they get delivered via the qmail transport. An example for lists eztest@server.com and otherlist@server.com would look like this:

/eztest(-[a-z]+)?@server.com/ qmail:
/otherlist(-[a-z]+)?@server.com/ qmail:

Set up qmail

Just make a standard port installation but do not enable qmail as your default MTA, after all, you want it to be postfix, right?

After starting everything you can test it

create a new mailing list:

# ezmlm-make ~alias/eztest ~alias/.qmail-eztest eztest server.com
# chown -R alias ~alias/eztest

add a test user:

# ezmlm-sub ~alias/eztest user@example.com

And that’s it. Of course your list probably needs some changes in the configuration files (~alias/eztest/) but this is all well documented in ezmlm(5)

Posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 9:31 pm in bsd | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback