where can i find qmail for breezy?

[Darryl Clarke]

On 8/26/05, Alvin Thompson <alvin-ubuntu at thompsonlogic.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 11:41 +1000, Peter Lieverdink wrote:
> > Consider using an MTA with a less sucky license. Postfix is nice.

I'm not going to debate any of this as they are my opinions based on 4
years of using qmail (and then switching to postfix)

> i've used postfix as well. qmail is:
> * much, much faster

I find for real email addresses they are both pretty much as fast as
one another.  The difference comes in the way qmail handles (very
poorly) invalid mailboxes.  Qmail accepts mail no matter what.  Then
it checks where to deliver.  Then it bounces.   In a world with
massive amounts of spam this is very very inefficient and resource
intense.  Then when the bounce bounces (as it usually will with spam)
you get even more mail traffic.  Because of this my error message
mailbox (from Qmail) would reach upwards to 10,000 emails per month.  
Postfix will deny invalid mail during the smtp session and avoid all
the unnecessary disk writes.  Now the only error messages I get (from
Postfix) are genuine ones (disk full, dns failures, standard stuff
that postfix isn't responsible for)

> * less resource hungry

My server load was cut by over 60% after I converted to postfix. 
Mainly due to less processing of bogus mail, less disk writes, less
bounces.

> * generally more secure

Any mailer daemon is only as secure as you make it; and really the
debian/ubuntu packages are quite secure out of the box.

> * much easier to configure

The configuration hierarchy of qmail is confusing, and annoying (if
you use the default structure) The file formats of some of the db
files are annoying too. The debian packages I used had everything
symlinked from /etc/qmail/ so it wasn't too bad and too far out of
whack with the standard setup that debian uses.

> * virtually no admin needed

Every MTA/MDA requires admin.

> * users can easily create as many email address as they want (without
> bothering me)

With the use of a 3rd party tool for a) administration, b) virtual
delivery - qmail supports neither natively.  The same is said for
Postfix, with the exception that postfix can natively deliver mail to
virtual accounts by itself.

> * users can easily route emails to any mail folder they want
> * users can easily route their mail though spamassassin/whatever

This is the job of the MDA, qmail is not one of these directly (the
one it includes is very very basic). It can (just like postfix) pass
mail off to procmail via use of some nasty .qmail* files.

> * users can easily manage mailing lists 

Qmail doesn't do mailing lists directly.  This is th You can use the
SQL server of your choice, or many different local file formats - this
leaves it wide open for many different tools.e job of (most likely)
ezmlm, which admittedly is quite nice.  Again, management is done 3rd
party, and mailing lists are handled by something other than qmail.

> * much easier to move configuration when you upgrade

They're the same.  Copy the config, copy the mail.

> anyone know of any scripts to build qmail under ubuntu?

I've not seen any.  If you look for building it under Debian, you will
probably have more success.

I thought qmail was pretty at first.  I was excited to see a virtual
mail and mailing list setup that was pretty easy to setup and worked. 
Then I got annoyed by the way it handled things. :(

Just as an aside:
Qmail's logging sucks, without 3rd party tools it only logs in a binary format.
Qmail's queue managment tools are useless.
It doesn't do smtp_auth without patching
It doesn't do virus scanning without patching
It's not real Open Source

-- 
~ Darryl  ~ smartssa at gmail.com
http://smartssa.com / http://darrylclarke.com