Show of hands: how many of you skipped all that daemontools and ucspi-tcp junk in earlier sections, and clicked straight to this section on qmail?

Sure you did. You want qmail and you want it now!

That is totally understandable. qmail is probably what brings most users to Bernstein's software in the first place. Those folks over at Yahoo! are no dummies after all; qmail must have something going for it.

qmail is a big topic. Several websites have been dedicated to it, a few thick books in print are devoted to qmail exclusively and extensively.

We won't try to replicate all that material here. Instead, we'll just cover what you need to install and run qmail in the context of the other djb software described so far. That means daemontools and ucspi-tcp, of course, and the usual conventions of /var/multilog and /etc/tcprules.

We'll also add our experiences with some of the lesser-known of the qmail-related packages, such as serialmail, as we go along.

For the rest, all the finer points and nitty gritty of configuring and running a qmail installation, please refer to the resources/links page at the end of this section. In particular, Dave Sill's Life with qmail, Bernstein's Frequently asked questions, and a print-out of Andre Oppermann's Big Qmail Picture will be your constant and helpful companions.

You may even find our own the big qmail flowchart useful from time to time.