Giving up on qmail, switching to Postfix
News, Technical ·Thursday April 18, 2013 @ 23:31 EDT (link)
The final tipping point switching me from the venerable qmail was the inability to (easily) relay through an SMTP server that required authentication (as our new ISP, Comcast, does). There is a qmail-remote-auth patch, but it doesn't apply cleanly to Gentoo's netqmail-1.06 (the latest), and I just don't need one more thing to manually update, even if I had wanted to manually apply the patch once, which I didn't. Qmail has just grown old and not been well maintained.
Postfix so far has been a delight; easy to set up by perusing main.cf, running newaliases, and ensuring the sasl_* commands are set for SMTP authentication. Sending works (via ISP relay); receiving seems fine after a local test, but Comcast won't unblock port 25 until tomorrow, so I can't be sure about actual remote mail until then.
Update, 20130420 midnight: Comcast finally unblocked port 25 after a second request; mail has been flooding in (we will still likely switch to AT&T U-Verse business, because it's close to the same price, no installation fee, no ports blocked, and Comcast said port 25 may be blocked again if the modem resets, even from powering off, or if they send an update signal). I also checked to make sure my configuration wasn't accidentally set up to relay anything it shouldn't using MailRadar's open relay test and it passed everything as expected. I also used to have a .qmail file that filtered messages through maildrop, which it seems needs to be setup via .forward for Postfix (or other methods); it was simpler than the example, which didn't work (didn't like ${user}); simply putting |/usr/bin/maildrop in .forward worked fine, since Postfix's delivery agent is already seteuid to the right user.
It still remains to get my spam classification working again, and a few automated mail programs.
Update, 20130420 afternoon: Re-added SpamAssassin using these directions; pretty simple; I already had spamd setup.
