4.7 Creating Addresses and Mailboxes

With the setup so far, every user in /etc/passwd automatically has a mailbox with the same name as the login name.^[1] If you're using mbox mailboxes, each mailbox is created the first time a message is delivered to it. If you're using Maildirs, you must create the Maildirs yourself using maildirmake. If all of your home directories are stored in /usr/home or /home, it's easy enough to give everyone a Maildir. Run a script like this as root to create them:

^[1] That's not quite true; for security reasons qmail won't deliver mail to the root user.

cd /home for u in * do     maildirmake $u/Maildir     chown -R $u/Maildir done

The chown is important so that each user owns his own Maildir.

If you have more than two or three mailboxes to create, use the convert-and-create script from http://www.qmail.org/. It creates Maildirs for every user with a mailbox, and copies the mail from /var/mail mboxes into the new Maildirs.

Once you've created Maildirs for all of your existing users, creating them for new users is considerably easier. Just add a line or two to your system's adduser script to create the Maildir as it creates the rest of the new user's files. On Linux systems, use maildirmake to create /etc/skel/Maildir, a prototype that gives every subsequent new user a Maildir.