I survived the upgrade from qmail to courier. [ I think ]

Well, last night I finally replaced qmail on my main mail server with courier. I’ve been meaning to do this for months – qmail doesn’t actually check recipients before queueing messages – preferring instead to send bounce messages – which causes a unplesent phenomenon known as backscatter where spammers burn cycles – sometimes significant numbers of them – by dumping a bunch of spam into your queue which is difficult to deliver. (Not to mention that bounce messages from forged senders really qualify as a sort of spam themselves, even if they’re not selling anything)

The migration wasn’t *entirely* painless, but it was pretty close. I renamed all my .qmail files to .courier files (using this possibly lame script: http://sheer.us/svn/perl_tools/renamer.pl), moved all the contents of /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains into /etc/courier/aliases/virtualdomains and added a @ sign in front of them (i.e. so radioalchymy.com: eben became @radioalchymy.com: eben), created entries in /etc/aliases for all of /var/qmail/aliases (to do this, the script cd /var/qmail/alias; for i in `echo .qmail-*`; do echo $i : `cat $i` ; done was very helpful), coiped /var/qmail/rcpthosts to /etc/courier/esmtpacceptmailfor, ran makeacceptmailfor, copied /var/qmail/locals to /etc/courier/locals, ran makealiases, edited /etc/courier/me to contain my fqdn, created a file called /etc/courier/locallowercase  (without this courier is case sensitive i.e. Sheer@sheer.us is not the same user as sheer@sheer.us, which will annoy almost everyone), edited /etc/courier/courierd to make DEFAULTDELIVERY=./Maildir/ instead of ./Maildir, and aside from fixing a couple of .courier files that had been relying on qmail’s setting every enviornment variable under the sun, I was done.

The upshot of this is that if you can’t reach me via email, you should email me at my gmail account and tell me. 😉 I only mention the blow-by-blow above in case someone else is doing the same conversion, comes across this page via google, and wants a overview.

In other news, recent events have caused me to install – via cygwin – exim on a windows machine, and the result is a suprisingly well-performing li’l mail server. If you need unix-style mail serving on windows, give it a try!

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