Qmail remote SMTP authentication

thanny · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2005 Posts: 55

At some point, the patch to do remote SMTP authentication was removed from the ebuild, so now I have a broken qmail installation (i.e. I cannot route mail via an external relay that requires authentication).

Does anyone know a reliable way to get this patch back into the build? I tried adding several variations of it, but they were all prevented from working via the addition of the utf8 patch, which itself is automatically selected when you enable SSL.

xineg · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2021 1:02 pm Post subject:

Can you be a little more specific with what your asking, you want others immediately on the same page as you are: You've opened well here:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2021 1:40 pm Post subject:

thanny,

I use qmail but only for incoming now.

Which ebuild worked?
Which ebuild is not working?
Full names and versions please.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

thanny · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2005 Posts: 55

It is mail-mta/netqmail.

There was a patch in the ebuild in the past which allowed specifying SMTP authentication parameters in the "smtproutes" file. That patch was removed in a recent ebuild for some unknown reason.

When I try to add any version of that patch manually by placing it in /etc/portage/patches in the appropriate subdirectory, the patch fails. I did modify the patch to use the correct path for the patched files in the ebuild process, which in this case means prepending the path "netqmail-1.06" to the file name. The patching process finds the patch file, but fails while applying it.

Looking at the code, it seems it's failing because a new patch added to the ebuild - "qmail-smtputf8.patch" - that changes the same area of code in the same file (qmail-remote.c).

I'm trying to avoid having to create an overlay or rewrite the patch, if someone else has already done the work.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2021 1:56 pm Post subject:

thanny,

Only netqmail-1.06-r14.ebuild is left in the tree and that's dated Dec 31.

As root, run

thanny · n00b Joined: 15 Aug 2005 Posts: 55

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21593

Gentoo tracks the package history in git, so everything you need is there. It may not be easy to use through the web interface, but it is not insufficient.

The patch was probably dropped because of the conflict with the utf-8 patch. If you can't get both to work as-is, then they are likely incompatible, and someone had to make a judgment call which one to keep. That call went against you. This is part of the reason such patches need to be merged upstream, so that we don't have multiple incompatible patches around. If you don't need the utf-8 patch, you could try reverting/blocking it, so that your authentication patch does not conflict with it.

figueroa · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2021 4:50 am Post subject:

I use postfix, cyrus-sasl, courier-imap as the main components of my mail server. I first set this up following a HOWTO I found in the forum circa 2005. I'm far from expert, but postfix let's me route to an external smtp server and cyrus-sasl handles the authentication (like magic to me).

I doubt anybody wants to change core components of their mail server, but I can confirm that it works. I've had it set up in three different situations, last time around 2010. I'd hate to have to figure out how to hang all that together again from scratch.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi