QmailAdmin

February 8, 2025 by Roberto Puzzanghera 146 comments

Version: 1.2.24
github
Changelog
Original Inter7 page

qmailAdmin is a free software package that provides a web interface for managing a qmail system with virtual domains. It provides admin for adding/deleting users, Aliases, Forwards, Mailing lists and Autoresponders.

As you can see, for convenience I moved the QmailAdmin sources to my github space. Nonetheless, all information about QmailAdmin will continue to be posted here, and this page remains the place to seek support if needed.

This qmailadmin contains the original Inter7's 1.2.16 version with the following features (updated to 2023.08.27 old patch version) and several modifications in order to compile with latest C compilers:

qmailadmin-skin, a patch that I created during covid-19 spare time, provides a new responsive skin to the control panel. It modifies everything under the html dir and many .c files in order to adjust the html embedded into the source files. Added a style sheet in the "images" folder and a couple of png files for the qmail logo. It will be much easier to modify the qmailadmin's skin from now on.
A patch to call cracklib in order to check for the password strenght. This should avoid unsafe accounts created by domain administrators such as "test 123456".
A nice patch (thanks to Tony, original author unknown) which gets qmailadmin to have authentication failures logged. This makes possible to ban malicious IPs via fail2ban. It is required to create the log file /var/log/qma-auth.log initially and assign write priviledges to apache.
ezmlm-idx 7 compatibility patch (author unknown), which restores the compatibility with ezmlm-idx-7 (thanks to J.D. Trolinger for the advice).
a fix to the catchall account (thanks to Luca Franceschini).
another fix to autorespond.c to correct the way the .qmail files are modified
qmail-autoresponder support (thanks Nathanaël Semhoun)

Setting up `cracklib`

Home page https://github.com/cracklib/cracklib
Download src and words list https://github.com/cracklib/cracklib/releases
Patch applied

Cracklib is a library of functions providing a password complexity check against a word list. It compares the chosen password with the words contained in a database and if it is similar to one of them it returns a negative response.

Before installing qmailadmin we have to set up cracklib. This patch upgrades the one of Inter7, which enforces qmailadmin only in the case of user modification but not when creating the user or simply when the user navigates the "change password" page.

Installing the sources

It's likely that you have the cracklib package and words list available in your Linux distribution repository. In this case proceed to the next step.

A note for Debian users: the cracklib package has libpam-cracklib as dependence. But it turns out that libpam-cracklib replaces libpam-modules, which is a system library that should not be touched without a good reason. Therefore I suggest to install cracklib from source on /usr/local as explained below. I tested this solution a couple of times and it will not interfere with libpam.

To install cracklib from source go ahead as follows in the usual way:

CRACKLIB_VER=2.10.3
wget https://github.com/cracklib/cracklib/releases/download/v${CRACKLIB_VER}/cracklib-${CRACKLIB_VER}.tar.bz2
tar xjf cracklib-${CRACKLIB_VER}.tar.bz2
cd cracklib-${CRACKLIB_VER}
./configure --with-default-dict=/usr/share/cracklib/pw_dict
make
make install
ldconfig

Installing the dictionary

man cracklib-format

Create the dictionary folder (the same as used in the configure command)

mkdir /usr/share/cracklib
cd /usr/share/cracklib

Download the words list

wget https://github.com/cracklib/cracklib/releases/download/v${CRACKLIB_VER}/cracklib-words-${CRACKLIB_VER}.bz2
bunzip2 cracklib-words-${CRACKLIB_VER}.bz2

Format and pack the dictionary into pw_dict.* files

cracklib-format cracklib-words-${CRACKLIB_VER} | cracklib-packer pw_dict

Now check that the cracklibs-words database has been created:

ls
cracklib-words-xxxxx  pw_dict.hwm  pw_dict.pwd  pw_dict.pwi

The database is made up of those three pw_dict.* compiled files. You can always enrich the database adding lines to the plain-text file and using a combination of cracklib-format/cracklib-packer as shown above.Take also note of where the database has been installed because we'll have to pass its path to the qmailadmin's configure program.

Testing `cracklib`

Let's play a bit with cracklib:

# cracklib-check  
dfdfdfdf 
dfdfdfdf: it does not contain enough DIFFERENT characters
roberto 
roberto: it is based on a dictionary word 
123456 
123456: it is too simplistic/systematic 
roberto928 
roberto928: it is based on a dictionary word 
robe99 
robe99: it is based on a dictionary word 
99robe 
99robe: it is based on a dictionary word 
robe@99 
robe@99: it is based on a dictionary word
Qwerty123 
Qwerty123: it is based on a dictionary word 
Qwerty!123 
Qwerty!123: it is based on a dictionary word
Rob&02f 
Rob&02f: OK
Rob&rto 
Rob&rto: OK
^C

To enable cracklib configure qmailadmin as

--enable-cracklib=/usr/share/cracklib/pw_dict

Installing `qmailadmin`

QMA_VERSION=1.2.24
touch /var/log/qma-auth.log
chgrp apache /var/log/qma-auth.log
chmod g+w /var/log/qma-auth.log

cd /usr/local/src
wget https://github.com/sagredo-dev/qmailadmin/archive/refs/tags/v${QMA_VERSION}.tar.gz
tar xzf v${QMA_VERSION}.tar.gz
cd qmailadmin-${QMA_VERSION}
chown -R root:root .

QMAILROOT=/var/www/htdocs/qmail
# CFLAGS and LDFLAGS can solve where cracklib is not linked, at least on freeBSD
CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" \
./configure \
  --enable-htmldir=${QMAILROOT} \
  --enable-cgibindir=${QMAILROOT}/cgi-bin \
  --enable-cgipath=/cgi-bin/qmailadmin \
  --enable-imagedir=${QMAILROOT}/qmailadmin/files \
  --enable-imageurl=/qmailadmin/files \
  --enable-htmllibdir=${QMAILROOT}/qmailadmin \
  --enable-qmaildir=/var/qmail \
  --enable-domain-autofill \
  --enable-vpopuser=vpopmail \
  --enable-vpopgroup=vchkpw \
  --enable-autoresponder-path=/usr/local/bin \
  --enable-ezmlmdir=/usr/local/bin/ezmlm \
  --enable-modify-quota \
  --disable-ezmlm-mysql \
  --disable-trivial-password \
  --disable-catchall \
  --enable-maxusersperpage=100 \
  --enable-maxaliasesperpage=100 \
  --enable-cracklib=/usr/share/cracklib/pw_dict

make
make install-strip

This installs qmailadmin in /var/www/htdocs/qmail.

Apache virtual host

Define QMAILROOT /var/www/htdocs/qmail
Define LOGDIR    /var/www/error

<VirtualHost *:443>
#       Include /path/to/sslstuff.conf
        ServerName mydomain.tld
        DocumentRoot ${QMAILROOT}
        ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ ${QMAILROOT}/cgi-bin/
        ErrorLog  ${LOGDIR}/qmailadmin_error.log
        CustomLog ${LOGDIR}/qmailadmin_access.log common
        <Directory ${QMAILROOT}>
            Require all granted
            AllowOverride None
        </Directory>
        <Directory ${QMAILROOT}/cgi-bin>
            AllowOverride None
            Options ExecCGI
            Require all granted
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Now browse to https://mydomain.tld/cgi-bin/qmailadmin and login as postmaster.

ezmlm-idx

Add-ons

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Comments

File error 2 modifying Forward with QmailAdmin

Luis April 29, 2025 19:39 CET

I'm getting "Filer error 2" when trying to "Add forward to Destination"

You can create a forward but with only to one email address.

The apache reports the error when trying to add more emails to the forward sales:

vmysql: error creating table 'valias': Table 'valias' already exists
vmysql: sql error[k]: Duplicate entry 'sales-mydomain.com-1' for key 'PRIMARY'

Here is my valias in vpopmail database:

MariaDB [vpopmail]> describe valias;

+--------------+----------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field        | Type                 | Null | Key | Default | Extr  |
+--------------+----------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| valias_type  | tinyint(1)           | NO   | PRI | 1       |       |
| alias        | varchar(32)          | NO   | PRI | NULL    |       |
| domain       | varchar(96)          | NO   | PRI | NULL    |       |
| valias_line  | text                 | NO   |     | NULL    |       |
| copy         | tinyint(1)           | NO   |     | 0       |       |
+--------------+----------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+

5 rows in set (0.001 sec)