How to set up a qmail delivery service

A qmail delivery service handles mail messages in the queue. It runs qmail-send with three companion programs (qmail-lspawn, qmail-rspawn, and qmail-clean) and uses multilog to store log messages. Both qmail-send and multilog are supervised.

Preparation

Install daemontools 0.70 or above. The following instructions assume that your boot scripts are already running svscan in a /service directory.
Install and configure qmail 1.03. Installing qmail means creating the /var/qmail directory tree. Configuring qmail means setting up some basic control files in /var/qmail/control, setting up some basic aliases in /var/qmail/alias, and setting up /var/qmail/rc. If you have followed the instructions in INSTALL from the beginning through step 8, you must have done all these things.
The following instructions assume that qmail-send is currently not running. If it is running, stop it now. If you have already set up your boot scripts so that they run /var/qmail/rc at boot time, undo the changes.

You will have to make two decisions:
- The qmail log account name, normally qmaill. Logging programs run under this account. If this account does not exist, create it now.
- The qmail delivery service directory, normally /var/qmail/service/qmail. This is where logs and a few configuration files are stored.

Create the service directory by running the qmail-delivery-conf program:

          qmail-delivery-conf qmaill /var/qmail/service/qmail

Look at the qmail-start invocation in /var/qmail/rc. If you have been telling qmail-start to invoke some logging program, change /var/qmail/rc so that qmail-start won't invoke such a program. Typically this means removing a phrase such as ``splogger qmail'' or ``multilog t /var/log/qmail'' from /var/qmail/rc. See the qmail-start(8) manpage for the detail.
Tell svscan about the new service:
```
          ln -s /var/qmail/service/qmail /service
```
svscan will start the service within five seconds.
Optionally, if you want compatibility with the official qmail documentation, create a symbolic link /var/log/qmail that points to the actual log directory:
```
          cd /var/log
          test -d qmail && mv qmail qmail.bak
          ln -s /var/qmail/service/qmail/log/main qmail
```

Check the service status:

          svstat /service/qmail /service/qmail/log

The output should look something like:

          /service/qmail: up (pid 6345) 6 seconds
          /service/qmail/log: up (pid 6346) 5 seconds

Run svstat several times and make sure that the process IDs shown do not change.

Check the log messages:
```
          tail -f /service/qmail/log/main/current | tai64nlocal
```
The directory /service/qmail/log/main contains log files to which qmail-send stores the log messages. The output should look something like:
```
          status: local 0/10 remote 0/20
```
qmail-send always prints either ``cannot start'' or ``status''.
Use ps to browse the process tree. It should contain the following portion:
```
          svscan /service
            supervise qmail
              qmail-send
                qmail-lspawn ...
                qmail-rspawn
                qmail-clean
            supervise log
              multilog t ./main
```
Two new supervise processes should have been added as svscan's children, one for qmail-send (running as qmails) and the other for multilog (running as qmaill). The process IDs of qmail-send and multilog should match with svstat's output. You will see qmail-send have three children: qmail-lspawn, running as root; qmail-rspawn, running as qmailr; and qmail-clean, running as qmailq. All these processes should be idle at this time.
Follow the instructions in TEST.deliver (in /var/qmail/doc or in the qmail source directory), starting at step 3. Note that the log messages are stored in /service/qmail/log/main/*, not in syslog.