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This is actually a very big deal - because of his prior refusal not to GPL qmail, there have been a series of ugly hacks and patches needed to make qmail usable. With this, they can finally be incorporated into the trunk -- and sites like this will no longer be necessary.

Of course it's secure - it hardly does anything. To even get the most rudimentary features a mail server needs to have, you have to patch the living daylights out of it and link it up with loads of third party software. You end up losing the security anyway when you add these features. It's not a usable mail server in it's native form for most companies - it's just far too basic and takes too long to configure for most real-world setups.

Look at how much extra stuff and TIME it takes to get a small qmail based mail server usable:

http://www.qmailrocks.org/install_rh.htm

I got a comparable Windows based server up and running in under 20 minutes. Try doing that with qmail.

Once again, it's only free if your time has no value.

A free book on qmail, Life with Qmail, is even available online and the quality is similar to Subversion's book which is among the best downloadable tech books available. It describes how to install netqmail-1.05 which is basically qmail-1.03 with a minimal recommended set of patches:

http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html

A company, Inter7, provides commercial qmail support but they publish most of their qmail-related software as GPL open source projects which can be downloaded and redistributed for free. They are super easy to use.

And then there's http://www.qmailrocks.org/ which offers installation scripts for qmail plus a dozen optional qmail-addons for these operating systems:

* Redhat Linux/RHEL
* Fedora Core
* FreeBSD
* Debian
* Slackware
* Solaris
* coming soon: Suse and OpenBSD

You can blame qmail for eating your system, but I was able to install it fine (manually from scratch) as my very first MTA ever and it worked fine. I didn't even fully understand bash or symbolic links at the time but managed to do fine.

NOTE: I installed (and still use) netqmail-1.05 + vpopmail-5.4.x + qmailadmin-1.2.x installation without all the extras available from qmailrocks.org

I chose qmail because it is currently the most secure MTA and that outweighed some of its disadvantages (like being slower than Postfix 2.2 by using more disk i/o and no-binary license). I'm considering a switch to postfix 2.3/2.4 when that branch is stable purely out of my curiosity and desire to be disloyal to every software/OS/distro I ever use. Switching whenever a *sufficiently* better software comes along (disloyalty) promotes better software all around.

UNBIASED SUMMARY OF MTA
(I'm using qmail+vpopmail in 2005-6, postfix in 2007-8, exim in 2009-10, qmail-2.0?)

qmail: most secure so far (amazingly so), easy to configure/admin after install, but not as good for relaying, slower than postfix, only unmodified source can be redistributed so installs are via patch+compile scripts, requires 'thedjbway' of doing things which I initially disliked but have grown to prefer it over init.d

postfix: 2nd most secure, fastest, not as mature as qmail but catching up fast

exim: monolithic & not as secure as qmail or postfix, usually fast but not for queued mails, Debian's default MTA means popularity will grow

I know some people think DJB (qmail author) is strange (he's a professor of computer science in illinois) but he managed to do 2 things that are rare:
1. write very widely used server-side software which managed to avoid serious security vulnerabilities for years: he helped us avoid using BIND and sendmail
2. fight the US govt. in court over cryptography

And for that, he deserves some respect regardless of what GPL fanatics say about him because of his unmodified-source-only distribution licenses. Their fanaticism is rivaled only by fundamentalist radicals infecting major religions like Christianity which ends up driving rational people away rather than toward it.

---

"Humans wrote the Bible. God wrote the world."
God vs Bible

Something like this?

I think you've hit a nail on the head, btw

http://www.qmailrocks.org/ and a few other patches for much larger setups

Check out qmailrocks.org for a fantastic full featured mail server install based around Qmail. Support for database users and ldap are options, and it includes spam filtering, web mail, and even an admin web interface. The website walks you through every single little step, and has paths for various linux flavours plus the BSD's and even Solaris.

In terms of scalability you're going to want to star with some honkin' hardware. You will also need to seperate the sending (SMTP) servers from the receiving servers and the mail storage servers, in order to distribute your load. qmail.org has a ton of info as well about the Qmail system.

The same person also does Qmail Rocks. Of course djbdns and qmail is much more secure than bind and sendmail.

http://www.qmailrocks.org/ is a great site for a complete qmail package with spamassasin, webmail and much more. I used it to set up my server, it is a wonderful guide. A little rusty in a few spots, but it is currently being updated. If you are looking for a server you might want to check it out, license issues aside.

Just to add to this, I'd like to point out a reason why this is a good idea.

In taking a class, the instructor tells you directly how to do something. You may or may not retain the information long enough to reuse it the next time you have to, say, install qmail.

However, doing it yourself at home will teach you that all-imporant skill of how to google for linux howto information on the web.

I've done a couple of qmail installs in my lifetime, but any knowledge I've gained has long been forgotten. Except for the fact that I know that qmailrocks.org is the place I go to re-learn what to do.

Try looking at this site for adding virtual domains and spam filtering: www.qmailrocks.org. It's what I used for getting my RH 9 mail server working (though I did replace the Courier-IMAP server with the Binc-IMAP server so I could use radius authentication w/o creating any local user accounts). It includes spamassassin, clam anti-virus, and other usefull goodies. The instruction guide is good for several linux distros and FreeBSD. (disclaimer: I've only used the RH instructions and they worked ok.)
jrbless