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+WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING
+
+  qmail does not support dot-locking internally.
+
+  You are in danger of losing mail if you re-configure
+  qmail without understanding the implications of this.
+
+WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING - WARNING
+
+On Debian the standard location for a users mailbox is
+
+  /var/spool/mail/<username>
+
+and when programs write to that file they are expected to lock the
+file to prevent another process from accessing it at the same time, and
+thus corrupting your mail file.
+
+For reasons explained in /usr/doc/qmail/INSTALL.mbox, qmail does not do this.
+
+The default setup uses /usr/sbin/qmail-procmail to perform the final
+delivery of mail with apropriate dot-locking to prevent loss of mail.
+This is just a script that invokes procmail.
+
+You should not really need to invoke this as a user, but if you can
+think of a reason to do so, a line like this in your .qmail file will
+result in normal delivery via procmail:
+
+  |/usr/sbin/qmail-procmail
+
+If you were to instead put something like:
+
+  /var/spool/mail/phil
+
+in your .qmail file, it would deliver mail to that file, but would
+lock it using flock's rather than dot-lock's.  Unless you know
+different, that would probably mean that every other program on the
+system would consider the file to be unlocked, and would leave you
+open to mail loss.
+
+Personally, I'd recommend moving to Maildir/ format if you can.  Read
+the files in /usr/doc/qmail to find out more.
+
+---
+
+How the Debian setup differs from standard qmail setups:
+
+  The default setup sets aliasempty (i.e. the default delivery method)
+  to be /usr/sbin/qmail-procmail, which is a wrapper around procmail.
+
+  This results in delivery into /var/spool/mail.
+
+  To change this to one of the more standard qmail setups edit
+  /etc/init.d/qmail
+
+  The binaries normail found in /var/qmail/bin have been split between
+  /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.
+
+  The configuration files have been moved to /etc/qmail and the queue
+  has been moved to /var/spool/qmail.
+
+  Symbolic links have been placed in /var/qmail to make it look like a
+  normal qmail setup.
+
+Phil Hands <phil@hands.com>