Removing exim and installing qmail

Removing exim

The first thing to do is to remove exim. Because of Debian’s package management system, you can’t remove exim without installing another package that provides mail-transfer-agent. Because qmail isn’t available as a binary Debian package, this is a little trickier than it needs to be. The answer to this conundrum is in the equivs package, so we install that:

apt-get install equivs

Then, to create the dummy mail-transport-agent package:

cd /tmp
cp /usr/share/doc/equivs/examples/mail-transport-agent.ctl .
equivs-build mail-transport-agent.ctl

This results in a /tmp/mta-local_1.0_all.deb file being created. We can now install this with dpkg:

dpkg -i /tmp/mta-local_1.0_all.deb

…which replaces exim with the dummy package. Be careful while removing exim, otherwise you might find that you’ve managed to uninstall at, cron and a bunch of other stuff.

Installing qmail

This is going to be a pure vanilla Life with qmail installation, so you should head over there and read that now. If I do anything different, I’ll mention it here.

While creating the user IDs, I notice that the IDS script creates the qmail user accounts with /bin/bash as a login shell. This ought to be /bin/true, so I’ve changed it with vipw.

The ./config script didn’t work, either, so I had to use config-fast:

./config-fast flimsy.home.differentpla.net

I opted for Maildir delivery, using the LWQ script and control/defaultdelivery.

Aside: configuring internal DNS

The TEST.deliver file asks that we test local-remote delivery. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work: the MX for differentpla.net is on my internal network. My router will not correctly forward traffic addressed to it that arrives on its internal interface.

To fix this, I’ve had to configure internal DNS, so that machines on the internal network refer to machines by their internal IP addresses. I have to configure the MX record correctly as well:

differentpla.net.   IN MX 10 peculiar.differentpla.net.

To test it:

$ nslookup
> set type=MX
> differentpla.net

Configuring POP3

This is done in the same way as given in Life with qmail, so go and read that. I didn’t do anything different.