The qmail Handbook

This chapter describes how to use qmail. If you read or send mail on a qmail system, this is where you'll find information about how to do that more effectively.

Overview

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Users interact with qmail—whether they realize it or not—at two times: when they send messages and when they receive messages. Although the Mail User Agent (MUA) is primarily responsible for the format of outgoing messages, the user can control some aspects of an outgoing message's appearance through the environment variables used by qmail-inject. This chapter documents these environment variables and provides examples of their uses.

• For incoming mail, users can control the disposition of messages and manage their private address space through .qmail files. For Sendmail compatibility, the dot-forward package allows users to control the disposition of messages with .forward files. This chapter covers both .qmail and .forward files.

• qmail also includes a set of user utilities including tools for .qmail files and for managing mailboxes. We'll describe these utilities and give examples of how you can use them.