Re: eQmail or s/qmail

On 15 May 2016 at 15:04,  <[email protected]> wrote:
> In linux most packages are distributed as rpms; packages providing
> additional functionality also come that way making maintenance easier.
> Additional configuration should be well structured. A good example
> being Apache. Qmail, somehow, never took that route.

qmail uses hardcoded uid/gids generated during make. This makes it
unsuitable to deploy RPM/debs. You also cannot backup the binaries and
restore it on another machine, unless the qmail users and groups are
exactly the same as that on the machine where the qmail binary was
compiled.
This problem was solved in indimail-mta / indimail. Also
indimail-mta/indimail does not use hardcoded directories e.g.
/var/qmail/control, /var/qmail/queue gets replaced by environment
variables CONTROLDIR, QUEUEDIR. I use build.opensuse.org to generate
the RPMs and debs and all my production machines use yum/dnf/apt-get
to install/update indimail-mta

> That is why it
> takes a specialist to use qmail and they are invariably in short
> supply.
>
qmail is far easier to administer than sendmail and postifix. No crazy
syntax. Just plain simple text files in /var/qmail/control. Just
follow the excellent guide LWQ from Dave Sill.