☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

I have recently installed Qmail following the Updated Debian QmailRocks Thibs Install

The qmail is configured just like Thibs points out the server was configured to a run qmail-smtpd script together with DJB’s Daemontools

I’ve figured out today connecting to the newly install Qmail host with telnet, using:


qmail:~# telnet mail.qmailhost.com 25
Trying 83.228.93.76...
Connected to mail.qmailhost.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 This is Mail mail.qmailhost.com ESMTP


Does a few seconds delay until my configured qmail greeting shows up. This is not a a deadly problem, but the delay itself might have a negative influence and make the host look like a spammer host to someone, hence I took few seconds to find a way to reduce this SMTP port connection delay.

The mail server responds on port 25, using qmail-smtpd so it was logical delay is caused somewhere by /service/qmail-smtpd/run (which actually links to /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd/run).

I did a quick review of /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd/run and found two lines that possibly create unnecessery delay, cause on each and every Port 25 connection request from repote SMTP server /usr/bin/head and /usr/bin/which are executed.
Here are two lines in /service/qmail-smtpd/run, I refer to:


LOCAL=`head -1 $VQ/control/me


(located on line 34)

and


TRUE=`which true`


located on line 116

The script was smartly written as planned to run on multiple Linux distributions. However since QmailRocks Thibs guide and my particular case needs to run on Debian Linux I think this is totally waste of system CPU time.

Therefore I substituted above two lines with:


LOCAL="/var/qmail/control/me"



TRUE="/bin/true"


I checked in /var/qmail/control/me I have only my primary mail server host defined, cause otherwise this changed could pose random mail server errors:


qmail:~# wc -l /var/qmail/control/me
1 /var/qmail/control/me
qmail:~# cat /var/qmail/control/me
mail.qmailhost.com


An updated version of /service/qmail-smtpd/run script you can download from here

If you don’t want to temper manually edit the script the quickest way is to overwrite old script with changed one, i.e.:


qmail:~# cd /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd
qmail:/var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd# wget -q https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail-smtpd-daemontools-run
qmail:/var/qmail/supervise/qmail-smtpd# mv qmail-smtpd-daemontools-run run


To test connection time delay afterwards, you can use:


# time (echo HELO localhost | telnet mail.qmailhost.com 25)
Trying 83.228.93.76...
Connected to mail.qmailhost.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
real 0m0.070s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.000s


Well still there is a connection delay – it is not so quick as smtp.gmail.com, but now connection response delay is better. For sake of comparison here is same test with Google’s SMTP:


$ time (echo HELO localhost | telnet smtp.gmail.com 25)
Trying 173.194.70.108...
Connected to gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
real 0m0.017s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.000s


BTW a bit of time delay sometimes, can have a positive impact against spammers, as it can reduce a bit the amount of spammer mail servers connecting to the host. So i’m not sure if being 4 times slower in connection than Gmail is necessery bad 🙂