Creating POP accounts with qmail

Preliminary Steps:

1. Install qmail. There's lots of good documentation for doing this in the distribution.

2. Read this other documentation about enabling non-system POP3 accounts with qmail. I wrote this document to improve the existing documentation for this procedure, but you may find the old docs interesting still.

3. Add a system account called popuser. You have to be root to do this under most typical situations.

4. If your system uses inetd, add the following to /etc/inetd.conf and then KILL -HUP inetd:
   

     pop-3   stream  tcp     nowait  root     /var/qmail/bin/qmail-popup qmail-popup mail.supercomm.com checkpoppasswd /var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir

   Notice the reference to checkpoppasswd in this line. This should be installed in /bin/checkpoppasswd. You can pick the source for that up here

   If you're using xinetd, you should use this instead (thanks to Nitro for providing this):

     service pop3
     { 
             disable         = no
             socket_type     = stream
             protocol        = tcp
             wait            = no
             user            = root
             server          = /var/qmail/bin/qmail-popup
             server_args     = mail.supercomm.com /bin/checkpoppasswd /var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir
     }
   

Steps for adding POP accounts:

1. Make the appropriate dir under /home/popuser/popboxes/ like this:
   

     mkdir /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/

2. Make him a dir for his .qmail file and his mail:
   

     mkdir /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/

3. Make him a Maildir/ (technical qmail word - look it up!):
   

     mkdir /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/Maildir/
     mkdir /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/Maildir/cur/
     mkdir /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/Maildir/new/
     mkdir /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/Maildir/tmp/

4. Make him a .qmail file telling qmail where to put his mail:
   /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/.qmail should contain one line:
   

   /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/Maildir/

5. Chown everything over to popuser and set permissions:
   

     chown -R popuser.popuser /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/
     chmod -R 700 /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/
     chmod  600 /home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/.qmail

6. Edit /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains to contain this line:
   

   www.supercomm.com:supercomm

7. Edit /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts to contain this line:
   

   supercomm.com

8. Edit /var/qmail/users/assign to contain this new line (This line is long and does begin with an "equals" sign)
   

   =supercomm-jimbob:popuser:513:513:/home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob/:::

   (Note: The last line of the assign file should be a dot '.' no quotes)

9. Run this command as root:
   

     /var/qmail/bin/qmail-newu

10. Add a password for the user by adding a line to /var/qmail/users/poppasswd:
    

    jimbob:[hashed_password]:popuser:/home/popuser/popboxes/www.supercomm.com/jimbob

    Here's a quick command line perl thingy for making a crypt'd password:
    

      $ perl -e "print crypt('mypassword', 'Sa')";

    The 'Sa' can be any two chars - it's the salt for the crypt function.

11. Kill -HUP the qmail-send process (as root).

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