Hi

I'm having some problems getting maildrop working as I want it. I've spent many hours reading the documentation for maildrop, sqwebmail and qmailadmin, reading the mail archives for maildrop, and doing google searches but still haven't found the answer (which will probably turn out to have been under my nose all along). Any help will be appreciated.

First some background. We have some servers running *old* versions of qmail, vpopmail, vchkpw, qmailadmin, sqwebmail, courier-imap and qmail-pop3d providing virtual mail domains to many clients. Even though it's not supported, sqwebmail is running happily under suexec (there's no way we're going to run without suexec because that forces people into leaving directories world-writeable if they need CGIs to create or modify data files and that's too dangerous).

We wanted to switch to newer versions of vpopmail, qmailadmin and sqwebmail for the new server we're commissioning, mainly for the security fixes but also in case there were any nice new features. So I grabbed qmailadmin 1.0.6, sqwebmail 3.5.3 and vpopmail 5.2.1 (this was some weeks ago because other things got in the way of actually installing the stuff). I installed them and got them working despite Apache on our servers running suexec (it's possible if you don't need to change system passwords from sqwebmail and can live without authdaemon authentication on sqwebmai).

Then my boss read about mailfilters and autoreplies in this version of sqwebmail and decided we had to have them so all our clients can do the sort of things they're able to do on Exchange servers - like setting up server rules and vacation replies (my boss may be a bit pointy-haired at times but I agree with him on this one because if we don't provide these sort of features we'll lose clients). So I grabbed maildrop 1.5.3 and installed it. I created /usr/local/share/sqwebmail/ maildirfilterconfig and, as the docs told me to do, I put in:

MAILDIRFILTER=../.mailfilter MAILDIR = ./maildir

After doing that sqwebmail then had new links for editing mail filters and autoreplies. So I set some filters and they did absolutely nothing. After a lot of digging around trying to find out why it wasn't working, I tried manually creating a /home/vpopmail/domains/domain/user/.qmail file owned by vpopmail:vchkpw (the user/group sqwebmail runs as) containing

|/usr/local/bin/maildrop ./.mailfilter

and the filters started working. What I am clearly missing is how to make that happen automatically. I've read many messages which tell me how to work around it in ways that conflict with these specific requirements:

1) It must not require changes to a domain's .qmail-default which are incompatible with qmailadmin. Our clients use qmailadmin to control their mail setup and often wish to change what happens to the catch-all mail. So changing .qmail-default to use maildrop instead of vdelivermail is not an option.

2) It must not require intervention by the domain's postmaster or (worse) by me if some user wants to set up a vacation message or a filter. So hacking qmailadmin or requiring manual intervention by me are not options.

3) It has to be compatible with vchkpw authentication and with sqwebmail running as vpopmail:vchkpw. Since /var/vpopmail/domains and all below it are owned by vpopmail:vchkpw I don't see that being a problem, but I'm obviously missing something or I wouldn't be writing this...

I'm probably missing something very obvious here, but I blame it on old age and alcohol. The file /etc/maildroprc looks like it might be the answer but if it isn't then mail will probably get lost. The only mail domain on this server belongs to the boss and is all about his hobby (getting hundreds of mails a day) so I really don't want to try anything unless I'm sure mail won't get bounced.

One bizarre extra piece of information. After playing around editing filters and autoreplies, I happened to look at the .qmail file I created manually. It no longer contained what I had put in there but instead contained these lines:

&| &/usr/local/bin/maildrop

which don't look right to me. I restored my original and tried to reproduce that behaviour but so far without success.