Notes on running a Qmail Server

• If you're running qmail-verify (or anything which uses the DJB Daemontools package), you'll need this: http://scriptkitchen.com/qmail/clear . It's also useful to create a /commands/svclear command, which performs the shell command suggested in the tail end of the script.
• I had to edit the SpamCop? plugin for SpamAssassin? to report spam to port 25 instead of port 587. If you can't connect to mx1.spamcop.com, or mx2, on 587... then you should try 25. The file I changed was /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/SpamCop.pm; just search for 587 and you'll find the line in question. This will resolve the error, "warn: reporter: SpamCop? report to vmx1.spamcop.net failed: Net::SMTP error"
• If, like me, you are reporting spam via Pyzor as a different user... make sure you run 'pyzor discover' as that particular user, or else it will never manage to store the discovery data. For some reason, it doesn't store the data somewhere global (say, in /etc/mail) when you run it as root.
• If you like running qmailadmin, but have installed the qmail-verify anti-backscatter patch, you will quickly learn that .qmail-default is necessary in order for qmailadmin to work. My fix for this was to go into the source of qmailadmin and modify user.c so that it treats a MISSING .qmail-default file identically to having found one which contains "bounce-no-mailbox". I've noted this to the guys at the qmailadmin Sourceforge project, and hopefully they'll provide this as a configure option. I wouldn't like to have to manually tweak the source each time I install a new version of qmailadmin.

-- SeanNewton - 23 Feb 2008