Source: qmail Maintainer: Philip Hands Section: mail Priority: extra Standards-Version: 2.1.2.2 Package: qmail Architecture: any Section: mail Priority: extra Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, netbase, procmail Provides: mail-transport-agent Conflicts: mail-transport-agent Suggests: pine | mail-reader Description: Secure, reliable, efficient, simple mail transport system 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. . Reliable: qmail's straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a message, once accepted into the system, will never be lost. qmail also supports maildir, a new, super-reliable user mailbox format. Maildirs, unlike mbox files and mh folders, won't be corrupted if the system crashes during delivery. Even better, not only can a user safely read his mail over NFS, but any number of NFS clients can deliver mail to him at the same time. . Efficient: On a Pentium, qmail can easily sustain 200000 local messages per day---that's separate messages injected and delivered to mailboxes in a real test! Although remote deliveries are inherently limited by the slowness of DNS and SMTP, qmail overlaps 20 simultaneous deliveries by default, so it zooms quickly through mailing lists. . Simple: qmail is vastly smaller than any other Internet MTA. Some reasons why: (1) Other MTAs have separate forwarding, aliasing, and mailing list mechanisms. qmail has one simple forwarding mechanism that lets users handle their own mailing lists. (2) Other MTAs offer a spectrum of delivery modes, from fast+unsafe to slow+queued. qmail-send is instantly triggered by new items in the queue, so the qmail system has just one delivery mode: fast+queued. (3) Other MTAs include, in effect, a specialized version of inetd that watches the load average. qmail's design inherently limits the machine load, so qmail-smtpd can safely run from your system's inetd. . 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. Package: qmail-src Architecture: all Section: mail Depends: dpkg-dev, fakeroot | sudo Priority: extra Description: Source only package for building qmail binary package qmail is a secure Secure, reliable, efficient, simple mail transport system. . Dan Bernstein (qmail's author) only gives permission for qmail to be distributed in source form, or binary for by approval. This package has been put together to allow people to easily build a qmail binary package for themselves, from source. . If there is a package called qmail available, then Dan has approved the binary version of the package for approval, so you might as well install that and save yourself some effort.