sendqmailq - sends queued emails to a remote SMTP server

Introduction

sendqmailq is intended for home computers that run qmail as their MTA but do not have permanent connection to the Internet. The outbound emails are stored locally in a queue, and when the IP connection is brought up, sendqmailq sends them to the ISP's SMTP server. Unlike serialmail, sendqmail sends one single copy of an email to multiple recipients (instead of one copy each). Unlike serialmail, sendqmailq is slow, insecure and sucks at handling loads of emails. But hey, it's only for home use.

Copying

This software is provided in the hope that it might be useful, but with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You are welcome to use it and distribute it under certain restrictions. See the GNU General Public License for details.

Requirements

qmail. I'm using version 1.0.3.
Perl, plus a number of perl modules (freely available from CPAN):
- Net::SMTP
- Pod::Usage

Installation

The trickiest part is to install (and configure) qmail. Most of the documentation available out there explains how to set up qmail on powerful servers that handle several hundreds of thousands of email a day. On the other hand, there are but few explanations on how to configure it for your home use. Such a document exists, though, and I wrote my own, which you can find here.

As for installing, sendqmailq itself, it's quite easy (really).

Make sure that you've got a running version of Perl, plus all required modules.
Download and extract the tarball into a temporary directory
Copy the program sendqmailq into a more appropriate directory (/usr/local/bin sounds a good idea).
Add a line in your ip-up (mine is /etc/ppp/ip-up) to run sendqmailq whenever the IP connection is brought up:
/usr/local/bin/sendqmailq --smtp=smtp.your-isp.net
Extra parameters can be given, but this should be just fine if you kept the defaults of my installation procedure.
I also run fetchmail from my ip-up, and because all this runs silently in the background, I added a play command to noisily warn the user who connected that she now can disconnect without interfering with the email business (ok, that's the icing on the cake :-).

Download

The tarball: sendqmailq-0.2.tar.gz

Contact

You can send comments/complaints/praises directly to me, Cédric Bouvier, cbouvi@free.fr