This document explains what you, as a user, will notice when the system switches from sendmail to qmail.
This is a global document, part of the qmail package, not reflecting the decisions made by your system administrator. For details on
- which local delivery agent qmail is configured to use,
- whether qmail is configured to use dot-forward,
- whether ezmlm is installed,
- whether fastforward is installed, and
- all other local configuration features,
see your local sendmail-qmail upgrade announcement (which your system administrator may have placed into /var/qmail/doc/ANNOUNCE).
If your system administrator has configured qmail to use binmail for local deliveries, your mailbox will be in /var/spool/mail/you, just as it was under sendmail.
If your system administrator has configured qmail to use qmail-local for local deliveries, your mailbox will be moved to ~you/Mailbox. There is a symbolic link from /var/spool/mail/you to ~you/Mailbox, so your mail reader will find the mailbox at its new location.
qmail-local automatically adds a Delivered-To field at the top of every delivered message. It uses Delivered-To to prevent mail forwarding loops, including cross-host mailing-list loops.
qmail lets you use environment variables to control the appearance of your outgoing mail, supplementing the features offered by your MUA. For example, qmail-inject will set up Mail-Followup-To for you automatically if you tell it which mailing lists you are subscribed to. See qmail-inject(8) for a complete list of features.
If you're at (say) sun.ee.movie.edu, qmail lets you type joe@mac for [email protected], and joe@mac+ for [email protected] without the ee. sendmail has a different interpretation of hostnames without dots.
qmail gives you the power to set up your own mailing lists without pestering your system administrator.
Under qmail, you are in charge of all addresses of the form you-anything. The delivery of you-anything is controlled by ~you/.qmail-anything, a file in your home directory.
For example, if you want to set up a bug-of-the-month-club mailing list, you can put a list of addresses into ~you/.qmail-botmc. Any mail to you-botmc will be forwarded to all of those addresses. Mail directly to you is controlled by ~you/.qmail. You can even set up a catch-all, ~you/.qmail-default, to handle unknown you- addresses.
See dot-qmail(5) for the complete story. Beware that the syntax of .qmail is different from the syntax of sendmail's .forward file.
If your system administrator has configured qmail to use the dot-forward compatibility tool, you can put forwarding addresses (and programs) into .forward the same way you did with sendmail.
If your system administrator has installed ezmlm, you can use ezmlm-make to instantly set up a professional-quality mailing list, handling subscriptions and archives automatically.
If your system administrator has installed fastforward, you can easily manage a large database of forwarding addresses.