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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:

In the Requirements list, above, I talked about being able to send email from anywhere, using my laptop. This is known as selective relaying.

vpopmail is available from http://www.inter7.com/vpopmail.html. The latest version available at the time of this article was 5.4.0, so I grabbed that.

Another of my requirements is that my email should be accessible using IMAP. I’ve had a quick look at Courier IMAP, and (IMO) it’s a bit oversized for my needs. So, I’m going to install BincIMAP instead. I grabbed the 1.2.7beta5 tarball and unpacked it in /usr/local/src.

Quite often, I’ll hand out a qmail extension address (i.e. roger-foo@domain.com) so that I can more easily filter email received to this account. This is useful. According to the vpopmail documentation, the --enable-qmail-ext switch to configure is supposed to turn this on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to do anything. This is with vpopmail-5.4.0. I’m not entirely sure what it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t make extension addresses work.

Some of the email addresses on peculiar are “vanity addresses”. The people concerned don’t have user accounts on the box and the email is forwarded somewhere else.

peculiar is host to several mailing lists, using ezmlm-idx. This needs to continue working under vpopmail.

One requirement I listed earlier is webmail, so that I can access my email from anywhere. I’m going to take a look at SquirrelMail.

I’m currently using McAfee VirusScan on my Windows XP desktop, but I’d prefer to add virus scanning on the mail server as well. This is for two reasons:

At the end of Installing SquirrelMail, I’d finished installing webmail on my test box. Currently, this uses HTTP. This is not really secure enough for webmail, so this article is going to look at adding HTTPS access to webmail.

BincIMAP supports IMAPS for communication. It can either do this if you compile in SSL support, or if you use an SSL tunnel, such as stunnel or ucspi-ssl.

If you install this patch (mentioned here), then you’ll get SMTP-over-TLS in qmail.

To make it easier to manage the virtual domains on my email box, I’ve decided to install qmailAdmin.