As already discussed in the past, LoneStar Network’s mail system is based on qmail. In spite of the many criticisms for the pluridecentennial abandonment of this software and the wide preferences of many for Postfix, qmail has never given the least problem and with the integration of the Erwin Hoffmann’s Spamcontrol patch has always been proven a very good choice, at least for my needs.

For a number of years it was expected that the original author of qmail would keep the promise of releasing a version 2.0, but that never happened. Even the netqmail branch, which for some time had gained some popularity, has been abandoned for a long time.

Instead, Erwin Hoffmann continued to carry on his Spamcontrol patch over the years, adding features and fixing problems, which eventually made it a kind of qmail 1.5 rather than a simple patch with anti-spam functionality.

And since some time Hoffmann has made the leap of quality. He has stopped developing a patch to be applied on the original qmail 1.03 code, and started issuing a fully revised and extended qmail code, of which the previous Spamcontrol patch contents have become an integral part, and new additional features such as native IPv6 support and compilability in x86_64 environments. He called this “risen” qmail with the name of s/qmail.

S/qmail started with version 3.0 and is now released to release 3.1.9. This is a drop-in replacement that can be installed as an update of an original qmail while maintaining its configuration and installation paths, as well as all commonly used external extensions and software (eg Dovecot, ezmlm, VMailMgr, Vpopmail, etc.).

So I finally decided to move from my previous qmail 1.03 + Spamcontrol 2.7.33 to the new s/qmail 3.1.9 and for some days the LoneStar Network’s MTA is already running with this new version. There were no problems of any kind in the migration and I think they should not appear later.