We have been switching Jerum’s colocation facility over the last few days and I took the opportunity to install a new mail system. The new system, to put it mildly, totally rocks. It uses qmail for SMTP and POP3, vpopmail for virtual hosting and quotas, qmailadmin for domain administration, MySQL as the everyone’s favorite backend, EZMLM for mailing lists, SquirrelMail for web based email, SpamAssassin to stop SPAM in its tracks, and BlackHole+ClamAV for virus protection (which I hacked to make work with STDOUT).

Needless to say this took a lot of caressing to get it working. A few notes for those wishing to go down this path.

• qmailadmin has a bug in it that messes up the quotas used by vdelivermail.
• I was able to install everything but courier-imap, vpopmail, and qmailadmin as Debian packages.
• Despite popular belief you don’t need the maildir++ qmail patch or vqmaillocal to get this setup working.

This is a huge upgrade over my last setup which was lacking in a few ways. It didn’t have qmailadmin (something no qmail administrator should be without). The old version also didn’t support POP3 nor did it support roaming SMTP-AUTH. To boot the new version uses MySQL for everything (including EZMLM lists).