4.1 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.

4.1.1 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.

4.1.2 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 security and disk management reasons, it's better to put the mail in the user's home directory with his or her other files, but if you have existing mailboxes in /var/mail, it's not hard to persuade qmail to continue delivering mail there.

If you're converting from an older MTA, you can either set up qmail to deliver into the same mailboxes as the old MTA or, if you're feeling cautious, set qmail to deliver into Maildirs or home directory mboxes while the old MTA still delivers to /var/mail. (The disadvantage is that once you're happy with qmail, you have to convert and merge the old mailboxes. See Section 4.7 later in this chapter.)

4.1.3 Logging

The traditional way to make log files is with the system syslog facility. It turns out that syslog is a serious resource hog and on a busy system can lose messages. On a small system this doesn't matter, but on a busy mail host, it sucks up significant resources that otherwise could be devoted to something more useful. Dan Bernstein wrote a logging program called multilog, part of the daemontools package, which is far faster and more reliable than syslog, but not particularly compatible with it. If you're sure that syslog won't be a bottleneck, go ahead and use it, but if you might eventually want to use multilog, you're better off starting with it because switching a running system is a pain in the neck.



qmail
qmail
ISBN: 1565926285
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 152

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