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)<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 (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.<\/p>\n
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. \ud83d\ude09 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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}