~mdw / qmail / blame
| Commit | Line | Data |
|---|---|---|
| 9312c29d MW |
1 | WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING |
| 2 | ||
| 3 | qmail does not support dot-locking internally. | |
| 4 | ||
| 5 | You are in danger of losing mail if you re-configure | |
| 6 | qmail without understanding the implications of this. | |
| 7 | ||
| 8 | WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING | |
| 9 | ||
| 10 | On Debian the standard location for a users mailbox is | |
| 11 | ||
| 12 | /var/spool/mail/<username> | |
| 13 | ||
| 14 | and when programs write to that file they are expected to lock the | |
| 15 | file to prevent another process from accessing it at the same time, and | |
| 16 | thus corrupting your mail file. | |
| 17 | ||
| 18 | For reasons explained in /usr/doc/qmail/INSTALL.mbox, qmail does not do this. | |
| 19 | ||
| 20 | The default setup uses /usr/sbin/qmail-procmail to perform the final | |
| 21 | delivery of mail with apropriate dot-locking to prevent loss of mail. | |
| 22 | This is just a script that invokes procmail. | |
| 23 | ||
| 24 | You should not really need to invoke this as a user, but if you can | |
| 25 | think of a reason to do so, a line like this in your .qmail file will | |
| 26 | result in normal delivery via procmail: | |
| 27 | ||
| 28 | |/usr/sbin/qmail-procmail | |
| 29 | ||
| 30 | If you were to instead put something like: | |
| 31 | ||
| 32 | /var/spool/mail/phil | |
| 33 | ||
| 34 | in your .qmail file, it would deliver mail to that file, but would | |
| 35 | lock it using flock's rather than dot-lock's. Unless you know | |
| 36 | different, that would probably mean that every other program on the | |
| 37 | system would consider the file to be unlocked, and would leave you | |
| 38 | open to mail loss. | |
| 39 | ||
| 40 | Personally, I'd recommend moving to Maildir/ format if you can. Read | |
| 41 | the files in /usr/doc/qmail to find out more. | |
| 42 | ||
| 43 | --- | |
| 44 | ||
| 45 | How the Debian setup differs from standard qmail setups: | |
| 46 | ||
| 47 | The default setup sets aliasempty (i.e. the default delivery method) | |
| 48 | to be /usr/sbin/qmail-procmail, which is a wrapper around procmail. | |
| 49 | ||
| 50 | This results in delivery into /var/spool/mail. | |
| 51 | ||
| 52 | To change this to one of the more standard qmail setups edit | |
| 53 | /etc/init.d/qmail | |
| 54 | ||
| 55 | The binaries normail found in /var/qmail/bin have been split between | |
| 56 | /usr/bin and /usr/sbin. | |
| 57 | ||
| 58 | The configuration files have been moved to /etc/qmail and the queue | |
| 59 | has been moved to /var/spool/qmail. | |
| 60 | ||
| 61 | Symbolic links have been placed in /var/qmail to make it look like a | |
| 62 | normal qmail setup. | |
| 63 | ||
| 64 | Phil Hands <phil@hands.com> |