--- /dev/null
+UNIX has traditionally delivered mail into a central spool directory,
+/var/spool/mail. (The original name was /usr/spool/mail; some systems
+now use /var/mail.) There are two basic problems with /var/spool/mail:
+
+ * It's slow. On systems with thousands of users, /var/spool/mail has
+ thousands of entries. A few UNIX systems support fast operations on
+ large directories, but most don't.
+
+ * It's insecure. Writing code that works safely in a world-writable
+ directory is not easy. See, for example, CERT advisory 95:02.
+
+These may not be problems at your site, so you may want to leave your
+mailboxes in /var/spool/mail.
+
+This file explains several ways that you can configure qmail to use
+existing /var/spool/mail delivery tools. Please note that I do not vouch
+for the security or reliability of any of those tools.
+
+
+1. What to configure
+
+The qmail system is started from /var/qmail/rc with
+
+ qmail-start ./Mailbox splogger qmail
+
+The first argument to qmail-start, ./Mailbox, is the default delivery
+instruction. You can change it to run a program such as binmail or
+procmail. (See dot-qmail.0 for the format of delivery instructions.)
+
+
+2. Using procmail
+
+You may already have installed procmail for mail filtering. procmail
+delivers to /var/spool/mail by default.
+
+To set up qmail to use procmail, simply copy /var/qmail/boot/proc to
+/var/qmail/rc.
+
+Note that procmail must be in your system's boot PATH; if it isn't, you
+will have edit /var/qmail/rc to include the full path.
+
+
+3. Using sendmail's delivery agent
+
+sendmail uses binmail to deliver to /var/spool/mail. binmail is shipped
+with the operating system as /bin/mail or /usr/libexec/mail.local.
+
+There is some variation in binmail syntax among systems. The most common
+interfaces are shown in /var/qmail/boot/binm1, /var/qmail/boot/binm2,
+and /var/qmail/boot/binm3.
~mdw / qmail / blobdiff