[Dovecot] deliver and qmail

Matthias Andree matthias.andree at gmx.de
Wed Jan 28 19:32:40 EET 2009


Rick Romero schrieb:

> Some of the 'problem' concepts are opinions.  For example, I use qmail's
> unbundled sending to monitor mail throughput.  (I run a free service) 
> When the queue sizes shoot up, it's shut down and I remove the spammer. 
> A bundled email to 150 users would still be 1 email, and that does me no
> good.  The only place for Postfix would be a dumb relay for those
> providers that throttle connections (assuming that was a real issue for
> me).

Unbundling mail just for accounting? Seems a rather wasteful approach to
me. Other open-source MTAs I've looked at, including Sendmail, Exim, and
Postfix, that transport mail bundled, emit sufficient log information to
obtain the number of recipients. But that's a long way from the topic...

> It's a crime to not specify AT LEAST what version of qmail you're
> complaining about.

Since that's a public complaint, I'll still respond to this paragraph: The
version (qmail 1.03, netqmail 1.05) is up front, and has been from the
beginning.

> Or is it a bunch of different issues with different
> versions all crammed on one page?   The first complaint acknowledges
> that it may no longer exist in 1.03 (released when?).  If anyone really
> reads beyond that, I'd be surprised.

Irrelevant polemics, and if either you're overly susceptible to surprise or
your imagination is so limited, such may not transfer to everybody else...

The first complaint shows two examples, and I simply haven't checked if the
second example works against 1.03 or only older 1997 versions, because it
doesn't matter, the resource exhaustion vulnerability is there. I don't
care much, if someone presents evidence to one side or the other, I'll
update the page, but I'm not doing further research myself.

>>> The bigger problem, other than a minor hardware/filesystem upgrade, is
>>> does deliver obey .qmail files in the user's home directory?
>>
>> Dovecot's deliver certainly doesn't.
> 
> So back to the original question:
> Then it's pretty much useless in a qmail environment unless the admin
> has already changed those features to require maildrop or procmail.  If
> that has been done, then the directory lookup should already be done,
> and you can do deliver at the end of your maildrop or procmail script.

It's probably possible to plug deliver late in the delivery process of
qmail-local (i. e. as default delivery), but I forgot the details - let
somebody else speak up who knows qmail better than your or me do off-hand;
or better ask the qmail list (but be prepared for crusades on the list...
BTST).

As a pointer, check the various qmail examples on how procmail can be
integrated into qmail and see if those can be adjusted for deliver.

-- 
Matthias Andree



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