March 2004
Intermediate to advanced
248 pages
7h 18m
English
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Chapter 4. Getting Comfortable with Qmail
This chapter guides you through the basics of running qmail and delivering mail to users on your qmail host. It’s quite possible to run qmail in parallel with your old mail system, which is usually a good idea during a transition, so you can do everything in this chapter while leaving your old mail system in place.
Mailboxes, Local Delivery, and Logging
Before you start up qmail, you must make a few configuration decisions. None of these are irrevocable, but if you know what you want, it’s easier to set them that way at first than to change them later.
Mailbox Format
Qmail supports two mailbox formats: the traditional mbox and Dan’s newer Maildir. I won’t belabor the difference here (see Chapter 10 for more details) other than to note that mbox stores all its messages in a single file and is supported by all existing Unix mail software, while Maildir stores each message in a separate file in a directory, and is supported by a reasonable set of software (including procmail, the mutt MUA, and several POP and IMAP servers) but not as many as mboxes. If you’re converting from an existing mail system that uses mboxes, it’s easier to keep using mboxes, but if you’re starting from scratch, go with Maildirs.
Local Delivery
If you use mbox files, qmail normally puts the incoming mailboxes in users’ home directories. That is, for user fred, the mailbox would be ~fred/Mailbox. Older mail programs often put all of the mailboxes into /var/mail. For both ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.