Introduction

I put this site together as a reference guide for people who are new to qmail and need help getting it up and running. I initially became interested in Dan Bernstein's qmail for 2 reasons: First, I was tired or constantly patching sendmail every time a new exploit was found. Secondly, and most importantly, I wanted a way to do virtual domain mail hosting without too much fuss. While it is possible to do virtual domain hosting with Sendmail, it's a pain in the ass and why work so hard to make Sendmail work the way I needed it to when I would only end up with, at best, an insecure MTA that happens to do virtual hosting. I think that the main factor in anyone being reluctant to install qmail it is that, quite frankly, installation can be a daunting task. This is especially true if you're used to Sendmail, as I was. In fact, my first 5 or 6 attempts to install it failed miserably. However, once I got qmail installed and tweaked to my satisfaction, it lived up to its reputation as a solid, secure and no fuss mail solution. I also found that the hard part about setting up a qmail server is NOT the installation of qmail itself. Installing qmail itself is very easy. What's hard is customizing it and apending to it in order to get a mail server that does what you want it to do. You can find tons of sites that tell you how to install plain vanilla qmail, but it's another thing to find a good tutorial about how to build qmail into a badass mail machine. After getting my qmail wings, I decided to publish a site to help others out there who need an easy to follow guide to installing qmail and its appendages. My own installation of qmail is a combination of about 20+ sites of how to's and tutorials, so I wanted to combine all that information into a single resource. Life with Qmail proved to be the most important resource for me, but it mainly focuses on qmail itself. It doesn't go into too much detail about the many add-ons (i like to call them appendages) that can be configured with qmail. Matt Simerson's Qmail Toaster tutorial was also a valuable resource for me, but his configuration didn't quite suit my needs plus it's a how-to for BSDi. I was installing on Redhat 7.3 as well as Redhat 9 (although I've since expanded the site to cover more flavors of Unix & Linux). So, on that note, here is Qmailrocks.org. My little contribution to qmail users everywhere.

9:50PM up 248 days, 13:56, 1 user, load averages: 0.05, 0.04, 0.01 - need I say more?

Find out what other people think about Qmailrocks.org

Qmailrocks.org growth

Qmailrocks.org started off only as a qmail installation guide for Redhat. Today, the site covers the installation of qmail of 8 operating systems (officially) and is also known to work on at least 4 other systems not covered on this site. Qmailrocks.org has grown into a large community with it's own mailing list, mailing list archive, IRC channel and chat forum. The chat forum now contains over 3500 articles, the mailing list is bustling with activity and the IRC channel is getting more and more crowded by the day. Qmailrocks.org benefits from the contributions and feedback from hundreds and brilliant people from around the world and it is these contributions and my steadfast belief in constant self-improvement that have kept the site in a never ending state of change, improvement and growth. The site started off as just an idea and, thanks to the spirit of the Unix/Linux community, has now grown into an entity all its own. To all the people that have made this possible, I say THANK YOU!

About the Author

I'll start off by telling you what I am not. I am not a certified Unix, Linux or qmail god-like genius. I am no Dan Bernstein. I do not claim by any stretch of the imagination to know everything there ever is to know about qmail. I like my installation of it, however, and I hope that others out there will find this site as useful as I have found other qmail sites out there. I make mistakes and I'm sure that this installation guide has many of them. You can always feel free to give me suggestions, point out a typo or tell me when I am just dead wrong on something. By the way, I mean "dead wrong" in a technical sense. If you don't like my opinions on something, that's another story. ;) Like most techheads I learn from my mistakes. I only got to where I'm at with my qmail skills (and believe me, they're not complete) by totally failing at its installation at least half a dozen times.
Now, who am I? My name is Eric Siegel and I currently live in Atlanta, GA (USA). I'm self-employed, working as a freelance systems administrator/engineer for private corporations. I just quit my sweatshop job at a large hosting company to pursue my freelance work fulltime. 8 Years ago, I was a complete computer moron. I played in a rock n' roll band, did plenty of drugs and avoided computers like the plague. However, through a strange series of events, I began working in web design and e-commerce. I then began work as a technical support monkey at a large hosting company here in Atlanta. I eventually began to focus solely on Unix and Linux server environments. Motivated by a desire to get out of the slave wage hosting company before they started making me sew soccer balls, I started up my own side company which specialized in web development solutions, select web hosting and dedicated server management for large corporations. That side company has now become my fulltime job, as mentioned above.

Information about my servers

Currently, I have about 22 servers that I toy around with doing various taks. The majority of these servers are in my home on a private network and are not accessible to the outside world. As you can imagine, I use many of these servers to test and retest the various QMR qmail installations. This ensures that the QMR installation will always be current and will always be in a state of improvement. Exciting, isn't it?

Qmailrocks.org Technical Information

As you probably know, most "free" sites out there are usually just scraping by from a technical standpoint. Web space often has to be donated and so forth. Qmailrocks is very fortunate in that it doesn't function like that. My own business makes me enough money where I've been able to purchase an entire dedicated server exclusively for the purposes of the Rocks Project, which inlcludes qmailrocks.org. So my hosting needs, mail needs, bandwidth needs and whatever other needs I may have are pretty much taken care of. Why do I spend my hard earned money on a sever that only hosts free tutorial sites? 2 reasons: Because I can and because I want to. I enjoy making these sites. It's sorta like a hobby, albeit a pretty dorky hobby. However, monetary donations to help me pay for the server are always appreciated. I'm also always looking for people to donate mirror site locations in countries outside of the USA.

Here are some quick answers to some QMR frequently asked questions:

Does Qmailrocks.org use qmail?

Yes, for both the site e-mail and listserver. All the other "rocks projects" sites and most of my other servers use qmail as well.

What are the Qmailrocks.org server specs?

Currently, Qmailrocks.org runs on a Celeron 1.7Ghz server with 1GB of memory and 2 60GB drives. I have no complaints.

What OS does Qmailrocks.org operate on?

FreeBSD 4.11

Where is the Qmailrocks.org server located?

Houston, Texas USA

What software do you use to build/manage Qmailrocks.org?

Dreamweaver MX 2004, Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Acrobat Pro and the ever powerful Vim.

What kind of computers do you use in the QMR studio?

I have two computers that I use for my everyday work, including working on this site:

A Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with 1GHz frontside bus/processor, 512K L2 cache/processor, 2GB DDR400 SDRAM, 160GB Serial ATA primary drive, 200GB Seagate Serial ATA secondary drive, 8x Superdrive, Threee PCI-X Slots, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, 64MB DDR video memory, 56K internal modem, bluetooth module, airport card, Lacie external CD-RW, Altec Lansing FX-6021 2.1 speaker system and a 23 inch Apple HD Cinema Display.

A custom built Pentium 4 3.06Mhz box running Windows XP with 1GB of RAM, 5 36GB seagate cheetah SCSI hard drives, Sony DVD/CD writer, Generic DVD/CD writer, ATI All-in-wonder 7200 video card, Creative Labs I-Trigue L3500 2.1 Stereo Speaker System and a 23 inch Apple HD cinema display.

What does the QMR studio look like?

Like this: http://www.qmailrocks.org/studio

Qmailrocks.org Credits

Since starting qmailrocks.org, I've received so much generous help from so many people. I thank all of your for your time and dedication. However, I'd like to give special thanks to the following people for their support and contributions, whether they know it or not.

Matt Simerson - Author of his own Qmail Toaster how-to. One of my first and biggest inspirations for making this site.

James Skinner - For showing me the light several times, putting up with my dumbass questions, saving my ass over and over and for loving The Big Lebowski as much as I do. Truly, one of the smartest guys I've ever met.

Dan Bernstein - For ending this destructive conflict and bringing order to the galaxy.

Parnanand Patram - For listening to me babble on and on about whatever and for teaching me the value of practicality.

Dave Sill - Life with Qmail. The all powerful starting point for Qmail fans everywhere. A real nice guy too.

Bill Shupp - Useful advice here and there, author of his own qmail toaster howto and a real nice fellow all around.

Troy Belding - For his tireless work on the Slackware rendition of QMR. Now part of QMRcore.

The staff at Metropipe - For donating the Netherlands mirror space for this site and djbdnsrocks.org

Matthew Kanar - For developing a patch for courier-imap w/courierpassd

Eric Paul - For donating some kickass scripts.

Mark Teel - For donating qms-analog, a much improved qmailstats script, as well as generous site suggestions. Now part of QMRcore.

Patrick Ale - Loads of help here and there. Debian QMRcore dude.

Ryan Schlesinger - Lots of help with various patches and so forth.

John Simpson - For masterfully combining so many great patches into one big patch. Quite a timesaver!

Olivier Tassetti - For generously donating the French QMR mirror site account.

Andrew Davis - Thanks for the Australian mirror!