Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System
Copyright (C) 1998,1999,2000,2001,2002 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA
QMAIL ISSUES
There are some issues that users of the qmail mail transport agent
have encountered. None of the core maintainers use qmail, so all of
this information has been contributed by the Mailman user community,
especially Martin Preishuber and Christian Tismer, with notes by
Balazs Nagy (BN) and Norbert Bollow (NB).
- You might need to set the mail-gid user to either "qmail", "mailman", or
"nofiles" by using the --with-mail-gid configure option.
BN: it highly depends on your mail storing policy. For example if
you use the simple ~alias/.qmail-* files, you can use `id -g alias`.
But if you use /var/qmail/users, the specified mail gid can be
used.
If you are going to be directing virtual domains directly to the
"mailman" user (using "virtualdomains" on a list-only domain, for
example), you will have to use --with-mail-gid=<gid of mailman user's group>
This is incompatible with having list aliases in ~alias, unless that alias
simply forwards to "mailman-listname*".
- If there is a user `mailman' on your system, the alias
`mailman-owner' will work only in ~mailman. You have to do a "touch
.qmail-owner" in ~mailman directory to create this alias.
NB: An alternative, IMHO better solution is to `chown root
~mailman', that will stop qmail from considering `mailman' to be a
user to whom mail can be delivered. (See `man 8 qmail-getpw'.)
- In a related issue, if you have any users with the same name as one
of your mailing lists, you will have problems if list names contain
`-' in them. Putting .qmail redirections into the user's home
directory doesn't work because the Mailman wrappers will not get
spawned with the proper GID. The solution is to put the following
lines in the /var/qmail/users/assign file:
+zope-:alias:112:11:/var/qmail/alias:-:zope-:
.
where in this case the listname is e.g. zope-users.
NB: Alternatively, you could host the lists on a virtual domain, and
use the /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains file to put the mailman
user in charge of this virtual domain.
- BN: If inbound messages are delivered by another user than mailman,
it's necessary to allow it to access ~mailman. Be sure that
~mailman has group writing access and setgid bit is set. Then put
the delivering user to mailman group, and you can deny access to
~mailman to others. Be sure that you can do the same with the WWW
service.
By the way the best thing is to make a virtual mail server to handle
all of the mail. NB: E.g. make an additional "A" DNS record for the
virtual mailserver pointing to your IP address, add the line
`lists.kva.hu:mailman' to /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains and a
`lists.kva.hu' line to /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts file. Don't
forget to HUP the qmail-send after modifying "virtualdomains". Then
every mail to lists.kva.hu will arrive to mail.kva.hu's mailman
user.
Then make your aliases:
.qmail => mailman@...'s letters
.qmail-owner => mailman-owner's letters
For list aliases, you can either create them manually:
.qmail-list => posts to the 'list' list
.qmail-list-admin => posts to the 'list's owner
.qmail-list-request => requests to 'list'
etc
or for automatic list alias handling (when using the lists.kva.hu virtual
as above), see "contrib/qmail-to-mailman.py" in the Mailman distribution.
Modify the "~mailman/.qmail-default" to include:
|/path/to/python /path/to/qmail-to-mailman.py
and new lists will automatically be picked up.
- You have to make sure that the localhost can relay. If you start
qmail via inetd and tcpenv, you need some line the following in your
/etc/hosts.allow file:
tcp-env: 127. 10.205.200 : setenv RELAYCLIENT
where 10.205.200. is your IP address block. If you use tcpserver, then you
need something like the following in your /etc/tcp.smtp file:
10.205.200.:allow,RELAYCLIENT=""
127.:allow,RELAYCLIENT=""
- BN: Bigger /var/qmail/control/concurrencyremote values work better
sending outbound messages, within reason. Unless you know your system
can handle it (many if not most cannot) this should not be set to a value
greater than 120.
- More information about setting up qmail and relaying can be found in
the qmail documentation.
BN: Last but not least, here's a little script to generate aliases to
your lists (if for some reason you can/will not have them
automatically picked up using "contrib/qmail-to-mailman.py"):
This script is for the Mailman 2.0 series:
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# = 1 ]; then
i=$1
echo Making links to $i in the current directory...
echo "|preline /home/mailman/mail/mailman post $i" > .qmail-$i
echo "|preline /home/mailman/mail/mailman mailowner $i" > .qmail-$i-admin
echo "|preline /home/mailman/mail/mailman mailowner $i" > .qmail-$i-owner
echo "|preline /home/mailman/mail/mailman mailowner $i" > .qmail-owner-$i
echo "|preline /home/mailman/mail/mailman mailcmd $i" > .qmail-$i-request
fi
This script is for the Mailman 2.1 series:
Note: this is for a new Mailman 2.1 installation. Users upgrading from
Mailman 2.0 would most likely change /usr/local/mailman to
/home/mailman. If in doubt, refer to the --prefix option passed to
configure during compile time.
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# = 1 ]; then
i=$1
echo Making links to $i in the current directory...
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post $i" > .qmail-$i
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman admin $i" > .qmail-$i-admin
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces $i" > .qmail-$i-bounces
# The following line is for VERP
# echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces $i" > .qmail-$i-bounces-default
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman confirm $i" > .qmail-$i-confirm
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman join $i" > .qmail-$i-join
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman leave $i" > .qmail-$i-leave
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman owner $i" > .qmail-$i-owner
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman request $i" > .qmail-$i-request
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe $i" > .qmail-$i-subscribe
echo "|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe $i" > .qmail-$i-unsubscribe
fi
INFORMATION ON VERP
You will note in the alias generating script for 2.1 above, there is a
line for VERP that has been commented out. If you are interested in VERP
there are two options. The first option is to allow Mailman to do the
VERP formatting. To activate this, uncomment that line and add the
following lines to your mm_cfg.py file:
VERP_FORMAT = '%(bounces)s-+%(mailbox)s=%(host)s'
VERP_REGEXP = r'^(?P<bounces>.*?)-\+(?P<mailbox>[^=]+)=(?P<host>[^@]+)@.*$'
The second option is a patch on SourceForge located at:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=300103&aid=645513&group_id=103
This patch currently needs more testing and might best be suitable for
developers or people well familiar with qmail. Having said that, this
patch is the more qmail-friendly approach resulting in large performance
gains.
VIRTUAL MAIL SERVER
As mentioned in the ISSUES area for a virtual mail server, a patch under
testing is located at:
http://sf.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=621257&group_id=103&atid=300103
Again, this patch is for people familiar with their qmail installation.
MORE INFORMATION
You might be interested in some information on modifying footers that
Norbert Bollow has written about Mailman and qmail, available here:
http://mailman.cis.to/qmail-verh/
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