The INSTALL.ids has useful command lines for creating the various users that qmail runs under. Unfortunately redhat has slightly maipulated the parameters for those scripts. This script will create the users in a 'redhat' manner.
One of the problems I've been trying to deal with is a qmail alias that no longer receives useful information. (I.e. nothing but spam.) I puzzled over how to make the system destroy the message without having to periodically delete an mbox file. You see, qmail takes it's delivery job very seriously. It will not allow a message to be dropped into the ether unless it is going somewhere specific. It most definately won't accept /dev/null as a destination. I then realized the way to create an email black hole would be to create an alias that uses a pipe to dump the message somewhere.
I created
a system-wide alias in the /var/qmail/aliases directory
named .qmail-nobody. This alias consists of the following
|cat /dev/null
That dumps the body of the message into /dev/null and
allows qmail to feel like it has done a good job delivering the message.
Very useful for me anyway.
Qmail is very handy if you subscribe to multiple discussion mailing lists like I do. One of the problems with mailing lists though is that they can be a pain to manage if you plan on using them as a reference source. Also, archives tend to be a difficult to find and are often not as well maintained or in the format that would like them to be in. (you can't easily grep a website)
Therefore, what I do is maintain my own personal archive of the mailing lists I subscribe to via qmail. I do this through the .qmail-* technique of creating multiple email aliases. I have all list traffic sent to a (me)-lists-(listname)@example.com address. I then create a .qmail-lists-(listname) file for each list.
In my home directory I have a .lists directory. This is where there is a separate maildir for each list. The .qmail file does a maildir delivery to the list maildir, then forwards a copy to my main email address.
The script below is used to regularly rotate list traffic into mbox files for archival purposes.
