Taming QMail

I run my own email server. It uses QMail. I realise there are at least two problems there – all of the cool kids have been using Gmail for their email since approximately forever, and who the hell uses QMail anyway?

Like most of these situations, it’s that way for historical reasons. And, of course, I’d love to change the current situation but it works well enough most of the time that the occasional pain it gives me isn’t worth the pain of changing the set-up.

So there I am. One of about three people in the world who are still running an email server using QMail. And that occasionally gives me problems.

One problem is the management of the mailing queues. The tools that QMail gives you for checking the contents of the queues and deleting any unnecessary messages are rather primitive. It seems that everyone uses third-party tools. A couple of years ago, I had a WordPress installation that was compromised and was used to send thousands of email messages to random people. The outgoing queue was full of spam and the incoming queue was full of bounce messages. I stopped QMail and started looking for a way to cleanly delete all the bad messages while retaining the tiny number of legitimate ones.

I discovered a program called qmHandle which did exactly what I wanted. It enabled me to remove messages from both queues that matched various criteria and before very long at all, I was back in business (having also cleaned up the WordPress installation and tightening its security).

The qmHandle program was written in Perl. And I always had it in the back of my mind that at some point I’d revisit the program and give something back by fixing it or improving it in some way. A few months ago I found time to do that.

I started by looking at the code. And realised that it had pretty much been written to be as hard to maintain as possible. Ok, that’s probably not true, but it certainly wasn’t written to be particularly easy to understand. What the original author, Michele Beltrame, created was really useful, but it seemed to me that he had made it far harder for himself than he needed to.

So I had found my project. I wanted to hack on qmHandle. But before  I could do that, I needed to rewrite it so that it was easier to work on. That became something that I’d hack on in quite moments over a few weeks. The new version is on Github. I started by importing the original version, so it’s interesting to read the commit history to trace the changes that I made. I think there were three main areas where I improved things.

1. Splitting most of the logic out into a module. I say “most”, but it’s actually all. The command-line program is now a pleasingly simple:
   
   Perl

   QMail::QueueHandler->new->run

   1	QMail::QueueHandler->new->run

2. Improving (by which I mainly mean simplifying) the logic and the syntax. I moved a few variable declarations around (so their scope was smaller) and renamed some so their meaning was more obvious. Oh, and I added a couple of useful CPAN modules – Term::ANSIColor and Getopt::Std.
3. Using Moose. Switching to an OO approach was a big win in general and Moose made this far easier than it would otherwise have been. At some point in the future, I might consider moving from Moose to Moo, for performance reasons.

For a few weeks now, I’ve been using the revised version on my email server and it seems to be working pretty much the same as the original version. So it’s time to set it loose on the wider world. This afternoon, I released it to CPAN. I’ve said above that the number of people using QMail to handle their email is tiny. But if you’re in that group and you want a more powerful way to manage your mail queues, then the new version of qmHandle might well be useful to you.

There are a few things that I know I need to do.

1. More tests. The main point of moving most of the code into a module was to make it easier to test. Now it’s time to prove that. The current test suite is tiny. I need to improve that.
2. Configuration. Currently, the configuration is all hard-coded. And different systems might well need different configuration (for example, the queues might be stored in a different directory). There needs to be a simple way to configure that.
3. Bug fixes and improvements. This was, after all, why I started doing this. I don’t know what those might be, but I’m sure there are ways to improve the program.

I hope at least someone finds this useful.

Also published on Medium.