phquery

From: Julie Baumler <a4jb@psulib.cc.pdx.edu>
To: Yusuf Pisan <y-pisan@nwu.edu>
cc: djb-qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu
Subject: Re: Configuring Qmail to use phquery
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 12:09:13 -0700 (PDT)

Sorry for the late reply - I'm way behind in everything lately.

Qmail is VERY EASY to use with phquery.  We use it here (pdx.edu).
All you need is a ~alias/.qmail-default file that reads:

|/usr/local/qibin/phquery $EXT

You might want to check that the address is one that phquery can handle
(some versions crash on 1 letter aliases).  I've decided I'd rather remove
the occasional misaddressed letter from the queue by hand until I have
time to upgrade and/or fix phquery. 

Note that if there is a local username, mail will get delivered to that
address first - we used to have a bunch of hacks in our sendmail.cf file
to achieve this, so this is an advantage for us.  If you don't want this
to happen, you will need to put a line in virtual domains like:
	
	nwu.edu:phquery

and then instead of a ~alias/.qmail-default file create a
~alias/.qmail-phquery-default file containing:

|/usr/local/qibin/phquery $EXT2

(Warning, this last line is from memory, not my production site - I tested
it months ago but never used it in production and don't have my test setup
anymore.) 

I also create a ~alias/.qmail-alias file that goes to postmaster or
/dev/null, because some phquery messages go out with an address of
alias@<hostname> and bounce. 

I already ranted about phquery on the list once this month so I'll skip
that.  Feel free to ask if you have any more questions.

Julie

On Thu, 9 Oct 1997, Yusuf Pisan wrote:

> Date: Thu, 09 Oct 1997 09:43:26 -0500
> From: Yusuf Pisan <y-pisan@nwu.edu>
> To: djb-qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu
> Subject: Configuring Qmail to use phquery
> 
> 
> How can we configure Qmail to use phquery?
> 
> Almost all of our users use a 'ph' alias to have flexibility at which
> machine they read their email.  Unfortunately, the machine which is
> responsible for resolving and distributing mail for @nwu.edu addresses is
> overloaded.  To ease the load on this central machine, and to take over
> some of the mail delivery onto our own machine we would like to use the
> 'phquery' program to resolve aliases to determin the appropriate final
> destination.
> 
> How can you configure Qmail to use phquery?
> 
> --
> Yusuf Pisan
> Northwestern University
> The Institute for the Learning Sciences
> Qualitative Reasoning Group
> mailto:y-pisan@nwu.edu
> http://www.cs.nwu.edu/~yusuf/
> 
> 
>