I’ve been running qmail based mail servers for years. And you can imagine how many if I am planning this migration from at least 3 years. To be very honest qmail does a very very good job. This is the reason it took so much time to actually do it. In fact qmail has only one problem: it’s stuck in the past. If you want to install something new: say SPF of DKIM you need to patch, recompile. And who would want to do that when it has such a perfect install running for so much time untouched ? Of course if you are ready to make this step then you are probably know you don’t want to do that any time soon so maybe it’s better to install something else. Say postfix? But what about this nice install, and the migration? This is the thinking which took so much time for me and it was only after doing the hardy to lucid upgrade that I decided to be bold enough to do it :)

I won’t say much about the postfix install. There are very good documentations on ubuntu website such as:

Just a few words about the migration part. First, the mailboxes. This is easy, they are all in Maildir format. Just don’t forget that imap subfolders are starting with a . such as .tests . If you are migrating from Courier to Dovecot then this might be handy: http://wiki.dovecot.org/Migration/Courier . Also if it’s not obvious already if using Dovecot then your SASL method should be dovecot and there is no more need for cyrus or courier.

In conclusion without so many technicalities I think the 1 day effort for migration was worth the time. Adding new things, upgrading should be more easy now. I can only hope it will work so much without a change as the old qmail did.

Of course don’t forget to check the logs for strange things such as this:

said: 550 Access denied - Invalid HELO name (See RFC2821 4.1.1.1) (in reply to MAIL FROM command))

caused by a myhostname = localhost in main.cf.

Comments:

Adi -

I’m glad it worked out for you :) I should also find some time to set up SPF and maybe DKIM too, the links you provided look pretty useful even though I don’t use Ubuntu.

len -

These 2 last bits where actualy quite simple. In the mean time I also installed amavis-new for various filtering.

Eric -

How many domains did you port over? Thinking about doing the same thing.

len -

@Eric, I ported 6 domains but with a small number of users, less than 50.