On our production mail server we’re using a so called qmail toaster setup. It’s essentially the same setup as described by shupp.org. However, instead of using SquirrelMail for webmail, we opted for SqWebMail and maildrop. The nice thing about SqWebMail is that it offers a web interface for configuring the maildrop mailfilters. That way, every user can configure their filtering rules individually.

The problem here is that vdelivermail (of vpopmail) doesn’t support those mailfilter files. For that to work we need vdelivermail to call maildrop to process those files on an individual basis. However, this requires to setup the processing instructions for every mail account manually. Of course, this is unbearable on a large setup.

We came up with a patch for vdelivermail that automatically chain-calls maildrop if it finds a mailfilter file in the domain’s account directory. Some parts are based on another patch which source I forgot. I mainly extended it to be less strict and to publish certain internal vpopmail/vdelivermail variables as environment variables that could be used inside the mailfilter – namely username, userdir, domainname, domaindir.

If it finds the file in the domain’s directory, it will delegate the mail to the domain-wide mailfilter.
The domain-wide mailfilter will delegate the mail to the users mailfilter if it exists. If not, it will simply do a standard mail delivery to the account’s INBOX.

If vdelivermail can’t find any domain-wide mailfilter it will simply default to standard mail delivery to the account’s INBOX.

Here is the patch against vpopmail 5.4.17:

vpopmail-5.4.17-vdelivermail.c-maildrop.patch

If you’re too lazy to patch the vpopmail sourcecode yourself, here is the already patched vdelivermail.c:

vdelivermail-5.4.17-maildrop.c

(Rename it to vdelivermail.c and place it in the vpopmail source directory and compile.)

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