Well, when I moved to my new server, I found a Qmail installation preconfigured with its Debian Linux. Qmail was working stable, could be administrated through some web-interface that came with the server, and provided a virtual mail system through vpopmail.

But: Qmail turned out to be a nightmare in configuration. It’s not just a single programm, it consists of many different programms spread all over the system. And there is no single config file, as you would expect and as you are used to by each and every Linux software I know. Instead you have lots of files containing just one single parameter, and they may or may not exist.

It became even worse when I tried to integrate RBL-checks. The installation had no built-in spam/virus-checks, and the only way I figured out to integrate them was to set one certain parameter in the startup script – and it turned out to be very stupid because it would check even the mails I was sending, and would sometimes refuse me as an authenticated user to send emails to certain addresses. Dumb!

So I wanted to switch back to my well known Postfix virtual mail system. But how to do it on a production system without causing too much downtime of the mail system? The Gentoo installation instructions took quite a long time!

Fortunately I found an excellent all-in-one Postfix-virtual-email-package: vPostmaster! Installation was a breeze with its installation script, and setting up and configuring the complete system took about two hours only. It came with a web interface, integrated Spamassassin, ClamAV antivirus, Greylisting, SPF and Mailman mailinglists. As Postfix and Qmail use the same mailbox format, I could easily copy the mailboxes over to the vPostmaster directory. And I could integrate my RBL-checks again. Nice!

I had only some few minor error messages during installation, and the only drawback I can see so far is the required Postgresql database, which I had to set up for this purpose only.

I’m happy again with my mail server now, thank you guys!