# Working netqmail guide?

## yinrunning

I've followed the netqmail guide to the letter.  It just simply does not result in a working installation.  The two things that I've figured out so far after banging my head against the wall for 24 hours:

A) It never mentions that you have to install ca-certificates to get ssl / tls working properly

B) vchkpwd doesn't work:

```
Jun 08 19:12:42 [authdaemond] file not found

Jun 08 19:13:48 [authdaemond] stopping authdaemond children

Jun 08 19:13:48 [authdaemond] modules="authvchkpw", daemons=5

Jun 08 19:13:48 [authdaemond] Installing libauthvchkpw

Jun 08 19:13:48 [authdaemond] file not found

```

I finally found this quote in an obscure thread:  *Quote:*   

> It's not clear which version of courier-authlib you are using. Support for vpopmail was removed in courier-authlib 0.60.4, released over a year ago, due to lack of maintenance. 

 

Edit: The guide I followed is: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/qmail-howto.xml

Does anyone have any suggestions on getting a working mail server installation going?  I really don't care what / how.  I just need email to work, and quickly.  I have a client breathing down my neck.

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## Anarcho

I used to use qmail, too. But due to things like the above mentioned removal of vckpwd I finaly switched to postfix. There is a postfix guide on the gentoo page, too.

I just changed to handling of the virtual user mysql table to store the passwords as SHA1 hashs instead of plaintext.

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## cach0rr0

 *Anarcho wrote:*   

> I used to use qmail, too. But due to things like the above mentioned removal of vckpwd I finaly switched to postfix. There is a postfix guide on the gentoo page, too.
> 
> I just changed to handling of the virtual user mysql table to store the passwords as SHA1 hashs instead of plaintext.

 

same. it's really hard to justify qmail in this day and age

This fairly well sums it for me - http://www.disciplina.net/musings/qmail_rant

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## yinrunning

I got it working by switching from libvckpwauth to libmysqlauth and changing the variables in the associated conf file ( by default it tries to look for users in the mysql table ????? ).

It's up and running, but a lot of the documentation is just painfully out of date and the packages are far from well maintained.

It's not really qmail itself, it's the chain of packages together that are just not a solid combo any more it seems.  I might look into postfix, but for the moment it's working so I'm not fixing it.

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## Anarcho

But there are still some flaws in qmail itself (some headers make problems, it is not in all parts RFC compliant, etc). So I can't recommend it anymore.

Switching to postfix was some work but in the end I'm very happy with it. Especially with the SMTP PROXY FILTER and the other input filters which refuse spam during the SMTP dialog (this avoids bounces and saves resources).

The only thing that was really some work was the mailing lists. I finally ended up with sympa, but had to do a lot of manual configs.

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## Netset

I'm still using qmail with vpopmail (non-professionally), and so far it's been working fine for me. The usual guides in the wiki and the old wiki archive are more or less ok.

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## stripe

Probably it would be good idea to rewrite the most recent https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-539101-highlight-netqmail.html

But! pay attention at:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-789425-highlight-netqmail.html

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-789272-highlight-netqmail.html

In generic to say i made freshly new mailserver based on the most recent versions in that how-to document. The main change is hard dependancy on mysql or psql because of authentification module. Just personally i have made one change - disabled sql logging in vpopmail ebuild which makes database awfully huge after some time - and i dont use it - if theres need you have debug in /var/log/mail.* .

In comparission with authvchkpw on my old server i dont have mem leaks which i had to solve with nightly restart of courier-authlib and its much pretty faster.

If you ask me why i dont use postfix, well me and my clients are used to qmail. Me in config and them in qmailadmin. Everybodys happy.

S.

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## zuck

Hello,

I used to have my netqmail-1.05 patched with a remote-auth-patch that used username/password stored in control/smtproutes for authentification with my provider's smtp-relay.

Sadly, with netqmail-1.06 not only the QMAIL_PATCHES_DIR is no longer usable, but the patch I used before doesn't work anymore (of course, source has changed from 1.05 to 1.06 and the patch needs to be adjusted - but I'm just not that far into qmail-coding).

Then I read about qmail-spp. But the only thing I need and qmail-spp will not do is remote-auth.

So my question is now: how can I integrate/enable/whatever remote-auth into netqmail-1.06 ? Is there a flag or a patch or an env-varible to set ? All patches I have found so far do either collide with the other patched that netqmail needs or simply won't work on netqmail-1.06.

For now I had to surrender and switch back to netqmail-1.05 - but this simply can't be the answer. I really like qmail for it's simple, fast and secure setup and configuration - but a vital (at least for me) feature seems to be missing. I'd even plead for a fixed integration into netqmail-vanilla.

-- 

 zuck

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## bcddd214

something is jacked and vchkpasswd won't hook in.

I found patch madness and all kinds of other stoopid trick but a simple hack to authmysql and vpopmail works perfect out the box.

the trick;

you need to concatenate your pw_name and pw_domain to get the correct username.

MYSQL_LOGIN_FIELD       CONCAT(`pw_name`,'@',`pw_domain`)

note the back ticks vs single quotes.

here is my complete authmysqlrc

http://bpaste.net/show/67030/

and then in authdaemonrc;

authmodulelist="authmysql "

#authmodulelist="authvchkpw"

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