qmail control files in plain text, cdb or MySQL

IndiMail provides enormous flexibility in where you can put your control files. If you define environment variable CONTROLDIR=/var/indimail/control and all IndiMail programs will look for control files in /var/indimail/control. Define CONTROLDIR=/etc/indimail and all programs look for configuration files in /etc/indimail.

A little known feature of IndiMail allows some of your control files to be in plain text, cdb or in MySQL. These control files include authdomains, badhelo, badext, badmailfrom, badrcptto, blackholedsender, blackholedrcpt, chkrcptdomains, goodrcptto, relaymailfrom and spamignore. If you have quite a large number of entries in any of the above control files, you can expect a significant performance gains by having these control files in cdb or MySQL.

The mechanism is quite simple. For example, if you have the control file badmailfrom, qmail-smtpd will use badmailfrom. If you have the file badmailfrom.cdb, qmail-smtpd will first do cdb lookup in badmailfrom.cdb. To create badmailfrom.cdb, you need to run the command.

% sudo /var/indimail/bin/qmail-cdb badmailfrom

You can also have your entries in a MySQL table. Let say you have a MySQL server on the server localhost, a database named 'indimail' with user 'indimail' having password 'ssh-1.5-'. To enable the control file in MySQL you need to create the control file with a .sql extension. The following enables the badmailfrom in MySQL

# echo "localhost:indimail:ssh-1.5-:indimail:badmailfrom" > badmailfrom.sql

Once you have created a file badmailfrom.sql, qmail-smtpd will connect to the MySQL server on localhost and look for entry in the column 'email' in the table badmailfrom. If this table does not exist, qmail-smtpd will create an empty table using the following create statement

create table badmailfrom (email char(64) NOT NULL, timestamp timestamp NOT NULL,
primary key (email), index timestamp (timestamp))

You can use the MySQL client to insert entries. e.g.

MySQL > insert into badmailfrom (email) values ('testuser@example.com');

If you have all the 3 versions of control files existing, IndiMail will first do a cdb lookup, followed by MySQL lookup and finally look into the plain text control file.

Version 1.7.4 of indiMail will come with a utility qmail-sql which will allow you to create the MySQL table and also insert values from command line or convert an existing plain text version to MySQL.