Qmail Vpopmail Troubleshooting Guide

! Qmail + Vpopmail Troubleshooting Guide I plan on adding troubleshooting that I've had to do in order to get qmail+vpopmail to work. I personally spent roughly 16 hours beating my head into the wall to get all this working to my smiling pleasure. Because information is so lacking, I thought I'd stick it here.

Remember, whenever changing the configuration for qmail, you need to run either of the two commands to have qmail use them:

 svc -t /service/qmail-send

/etc/init.d/svscan restart

The Qmail Usenet Group has a fair amount of input on specific problems that happen with Qmail, and a few with Vpopmail working with Qmail. First, I installed this on a Gentoo system using this Gentoo Qmail Vpopmail Installation Guide.

Default Email Account: Let's say you want to have all email sent to a virtual domain dump to the mailbox "everybody@domain.org". To do this, create a .qmail-default file in that virtual domain's root directory (/var/vpopmail/domains/domain.org/.qmail-default). Chmod to 644 just to be sure qmail can read it. In that file, add the following line:

 | /var/vpopmail/bin/vdelivermail '' everybody@domain.org

This is similar to the condition when you want email bounced, but the last argument is changed to the default account. This solution, I have seen can lead to the following condition . . .

Message is Looping: This problem is resolved almost nowhere. There are many cries for help but few solutions. I have had this occur in two conditions: Local delivery, and remote delivery. By the latter, I mean when somebody from outside your domain mails to someone within your domain. The second is when a service within your domain (e.g. root) emails a status report.

• Remote Delivery I found this happened when there was a typo in one of the config files for qmail. So, check them carefully. If you can't find the problem, and if you've edited the config files, then run "/var/qmail/bin/config-fast domain.org." This will forcefully set the domain to the passed argument. This fixed external looping. However, it resulted in another problem . . .
• Local Delivery Occurs when the domain you are routing to a virtual domain (e.g. domain.org) is the same name as the domain of the computer. That is, when the /var/qmail/control/me and vpopmail host is the same. In this case, I changed the me file (and the locals file) to be 'gentoo.domain.org.' This way the system did not try to deliver domain.org mail to local users (see below), and would not also try to deliver mail meant for local users to be routed to the virtual domain.

No mailbox: This occurs when the system is trying to route a remote email to a local user, and said local user does not exist. Very annoying. A common fix is to clear the "locals" file altogether. However, I noticed that caused some grief. So, I set both "me" and "locals" files to the same value–and ensured the value was not the same as for any virtual domain (see Message is looping above). (:commentable:)