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authorJannis Hoffmann <jannis@fehcom.de>2024-07-03 15:48:04 +0200
committerJannis Hoffmann <jannis@fehcom.de>2024-07-03 15:48:04 +0200
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+Qmail BLURB
+===========
+
+qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent.
+It is meant as a replacement for the entire sendmail-binmail system on
+typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts.
+
+Secure: Security isn't just a goal, but an absolute requirement. Mail
+delivery is critical for users; it cannot be turned off, so it must be
+completely secure. (This is why I started writing qmail: I was sick of
+the security holes in sendmail and other MTAs.)
+
+Reliable: qmail's straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a
+message, once accepted into the system, will never be lost. qmail also
+supports maildir, a new, super-reliable user mailbox format. Maildirs,
+unlike mbox files and mh folders, won't be corrupted if the system
+crashes during delivery. Even better, not only can a user safely read
+his mail over NFS, but any number of NFS clients can deliver mail to him
+at the same time.
+
+Efficient: On a Pentium under BSD/OS, qmail can easily sustain 200000
+local messages per day---that's separate messages injected and delivered
+to mailboxes in a real test! Although remote deliveries are inherently
+limited by the slowness of DNS and SMTP, qmail overlaps 20 simultaneous
+deliveries by default, so it zooms quickly through mailing lists. (This
+is why I finished qmail: I had to get a big mailing list set up.)
+
+Simple: qmail is vastly smaller than any other Internet MTA. Some
+reasons why: (1) Other MTAs have separate forwarding, aliasing, and
+mailing list mechanisms. qmail has one simple forwarding mechanism that
+lets users handle their own mailing lists. (2) Other MTAs offer a
+spectrum of delivery modes, from fast+unsafe to slow+queued. qmail-send
+is instantly triggered by new items in the queue, so the qmail system
+has just one delivery mode: fast+queued. (3) Other MTAs include, in
+effect, a specialized version of inetd that watches the load average.
+qmail's design inherently limits the machine load, so qmail-smtpd can
+safely run from your system's inetd.
+
+Replacement for sendmail: qmail supports host and user masquerading,
+full host hiding, virtual domains, null clients, list-owner rewriting,
+relay control, double-bounce recording, arbitrary RFC 822 address lists,
+cross-host mailing list loop detection, per-recipient checkpointing,
+downed host backoffs, independent message retry schedules, etc. In
+short, it's up to speed on modern MTA features. qmail also includes a
+drop-in ``sendmail'' wrapper so that it will be used transparently by
+your current UAs.
+
+Mailing Lists
+=============
+
+Mailing list management is one of qmail's strengths. Notable features:
+
+* qmail lets each user handle his own mailing lists. The delivery
+instructions for user-whatever go into ~user/.qmail-whatever.
+
+* qmail makes it really easy to set up mailing list owners. If the user
+touches ~user/.qmail-whatever-owner, all bounces will come back to him.
+
+* qmail supports VERPs, which permit completely reliable automated
+bounce handling for mailing lists of any size.
+
+* SPEED---qmail blasts through mailing lists an order of magnitude
+faster than sendmail. For example, one message was successfully
+delivered to 150 hosts around the world in just 70 seconds, with qmail's
+out-of-the-box configuration.
+
+* qmail automatically prevents mailing list loops, even across hosts.
+
+* qmail allows inconceivably gigantic mailing lists. No random limits.
+
+* qmail handles aliasing and forwarding with the same simple mechanism.
+For example, Postmaster is controlled by ~alias/.qmail-postmaster. This
+means that cross-host loop detection also applies to aliases.
+
+* qmail supports the ezmlm mailing list manager, which easily and
+automatically handles bounces, subscription requests, and archives.
+
+Features
+========
+
+Here are some of qmail's features.
+
+Setup:
+* automatic adaptation to your UNIX variant---no configuration needed
+* AIX, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, HP/UX, Irix, Linux, OSF/1, SunOS, Solaris, and more
+* automatic per-host configuration (config, config-fast)
+* quick installation---no big list of decisions to make
+
+Security:
+* clear separation between addresses, files, and programs
+* minimization of setuid code (qmail-queue)
+* minimization of root code (qmail-start, qmail-lspawn)
+* five-way trust partitioning---security in depth
+* optional logging of one-way hashes, entire contents, etc. (QUEUE_EXTRA)
+
+Message construction (qmail-inject):
+* RFC 822, RFC 1123
+* full support for address groups
+* automatic conversion of old-style address lists to RFC 822 format
+* sendmail hook for compatibility with current user agents
+* header line length limited only by memory
+* host masquerading (control/defaulthost)
+* user masquerading ($MAILUSER, $MAILHOST)
+* automatic Mail-Followup-To creation ($QMAILMFTFILE)
+
+SMTP service (qmail-smtpd):
+* RFC 821, RFC 1123, RFC 1651, RFC 1652, RFC 1854
+* 8-bit clean
+* 931/1413/ident/TAP callback (tcp-env)
+* relay control---stop unauthorized relaying by outsiders (control/rcpthosts)
+* no interference between relay control and forwarding
+* tcpd hook---reject SMTP connections from known abusers
+* automatic recognition of local IP addresses
+* per-buffer timeouts
+* hop counting
+
+Queue management (qmail-send):
+* instant handling of messages added to queue
+* parallelism limit (control/concurrencyremote, control/concurrencylocal)
+* split queue directory---no slowdown when queue gets big
+* quadratic retry schedule---old messages tried less often
+* independent message retry schedules
+* automatic safe queueing---no loss of mail if system crashes
+* automatic per-recipient checkpointing
+* automatic queue cleanups (qmail-clean)
+* queue viewing (qmail-qread)
+* detailed delivery statistics (qmailanalog, available separately)
+
+Bounces (qmail-send):
+* QSBMF bounce messages---both machine-readable and human-readable
+* HCMSSC support---language-independent RFC 1893 error codes
+* double bounces sent to postmaster
+
+Routing by domain (qmail-send):
+* any number of names for local host (control/locals)
+* any number of virtual domains (control/virtualdomains)
+* domain wildcards (control/virtualdomains)
+* configurable percent hack support (control/percenthack)
+* UUCP hook
+
+SMTP delivery (qmail-remote):
+* RFC 821, RFC 974, RFC 1123
+* 8-bit clean
+* automatic downed host backoffs
+* artificial routing---smarthost, localnet, mailertable (control/smtproutes)
+* per-buffer timeouts
+* passive SMTP queue---perfect for SLIP/PPP (serialmail, available separately)
+
+Forwarding and mailing lists (qmail-local):
+* address wildcards (.qmail-default, .qmail-foo-default, etc.)
+* sendmail .forward compatibility (dot-forward, available separately)
+* fast forwarding databases (fastforward, available separately)
+* sendmail /etc/aliases compatibility (fastforward/newaliases)
+* mailing list owners---automatically divert bounces and vacation messages
+* VERPs---automatic recipient identification for mailing list bounces
+* Delivered-To---automatic loop prevention, even across hosts
+* automatic mailing list management (ezmlm, available separately)
+
+Local delivery (qmail-local):
+* user-controlled address hierarchy---fred controls fred-anything
+* mbox delivery
+* reliable NFS delivery (maildir)
+* user-controlled program delivery: procmail etc. (qmail-command)
+* optional new-mail notification (qbiff)
+* optional NRUDT return receipts (qreceipt)
+* conditional filtering (condredirect, bouncesaying)
+
+POP3 service (qmail-popup, qmail-pop3d):
+* RFC 1939
+* UIDL support
+* TOP support
+* APOP hook
+* modular password checking (checkpassword, available separately)
+
+
+Internals
+=========
+
+qmail's modular, lightweight design and sensible queue management make
+it the fastest available message transfer agent. Here's how it stacks up
+against the competition in five different speed measurements.
+
+* Scheduling: I sent a message to 8192 ``trash'' recipients on my home
+machine. All the deliveries were done in a mere 78 seconds---a rate of
+over 9 million deliveries a day! Compare this to the speed advertised
+for Zmailer's scheduling: 1.1 million deliveries a day on a
+SparcStation-10/50. (My home machine is a 16MB Pentium-100 under BSD/OS,
+with the default qmail configuration. qmail's logs were piped through
+accustamp and written to disk as usual.)
+
+* Local mailing lists: When qmail is delivering a message to a mailbox,
+it physically writes the message to disk before it announces success---
+that way, mail doesn't get lost if the power goes out. I tried sending a
+message to 1024 local mailboxes on the same disk on my home machine; all
+the deliveries were done in 25.5 seconds. That's more than 3.4 million
+deliveries a day! Sending 1024 copies to a _single_ mailbox was just as
+fast. Compare these figures to Zmailer's advertised rate for throwing
+recipients away without even delivering the message---only 0.48 million
+per day on the SparcStation.
+
+* Mailing lists with remote recipients: qmail uses the same delivery
+strategy that makes LSOFT's LSMTP so fast for outgoing mailing lists---
+you choose how many parallel SMTP connections you want to run, and qmail
+runs exactly that many. Of course, performance varies depending on how
+far away your recipients are. The advantage of qmail over other packages
+is its smallness: for example, one Linux user is running 60 simultaneous
+connections, without swapping, on a machine with just 16MB of memory!
+
+* Separate local messages: What LSOFT doesn't tell you about LSMTP is
+how many _separate_ messages it can handle in a day. Does it get bogged
+down as the queue fills up? On my home machine, I disabled qmail's
+deliveries and then sent 5000 separate messages to one recipient. The
+messages were all safely written to the queue disk in 23 minutes, with
+no slowdown as the queue filled up. After I reenabled deliveries, all
+the messages were delivered to the recipient's mailbox in under 12
+minutes. End-to-end rate: more than 200000 individual messages a day!
+
+* Overall performance: What really matters is how well qmail performs
+with your mail load. Red Hat Software found one day that their mail hub,
+a 48MB Pentium running sendmail 8.7, was running out of steam at 70000
+messages a day. They shifted the load to qmail---on a _smaller_ machine,
+a 16MB 486/66---and now they're doing fine.