Brandon's Blog

Adding IPv6 support to qmail can be a daunting task. A modern qmail system includes several different components, with various patches and configuration options for each. There are a few patches on the internet that claim to add IPv6 support for a specific component, but I had trouble finding patches for every piece of my qmail install.

I’m not trying to defend IPv6. I realize there are many people with strong feelings towards the subject, including qmail’s author. Switching to IPv6 is a monumental task. It may never happen, but something needs to – we can’t keep NATing forever.

Many software projects have already added support for IPv6. My Gentoo box has been on an IPv6 network, via Hurricane Electric’s free tunnel broker service for a while now. Mac OS X has support for IPv6, as do the latest versions of Windows. Even Windows XP can support IPv6 if enabled. Postfix, Exim, and Sendmail all support IPv6.  Read more...

Brandon Server Admin email, ipv6, qmail

DomainKeys and its successor DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) are technologies that allow organizations to take responsibility for a message. This is done by cryptographically signing an email as it leaves an organization in route to its destination. The signature can be verified using the DNS system to establish trust. In theory the technologies help cut down on spam by proving a message originated from the domain it says it does.

Support for DomainKeys in qmail has existed for a while thanks to a patch by Russel Nelson. Kyle Wheeler created a set of wrapper scripts that can be used to provide support for DKIM and DomainKeys. Mihai Secasiu has some wrapper scripts similar to Kyle’s that provide support for DKIM via the libdkim library instead of Perl’s Mail::DKIM module.  Read more...

Brandon Server Admin DKIM, DomainKeys, email, howto, qmail