Qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent. It is meant as a replacement for the entire sendmail-binmail system on typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts.
Secure: Security isn’t just a goal, but an absolute requirement.
Reliable: qmail’s straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a message, once accepted into the system, will never be lost.
Replacement for sendmail: qmail supports host and user masquerading, full host hiding, virtual domains, null clients, list-owner rewriting, relay control, double-bounce recording, arbitrary RFC 822 address lists, cross-host mailing list loop detection, per-recipient checkpointing, downed host backoffs, independent message retry schedules, etc. In short, it’s up to speed on modern MTA features. qmail also includes a drop-in “sendmail” wrapper so that it will be used transparently by your current UAs.
Overall performance: What really matters is how well qmail performs with your mail load. Red Hat Software found one day that their mail hub, a 48MB Pentium running sendmail 8.7, was running out of steam at 70000 messages a day. They shifted the load to qmail—on a smaller machine, a 16MB 486/66—and now they’re doing fine.
In my presentation I hope to cover:
* Introduction and explanation of Qmail
* Why use Qmail? (why sendmail is not the best thing to use)
* How to install Qmail
* Installing a mailing list manager to go along with Qmail
* Configuring your POP3 and IMAP services to understand Qmail