1 As you've seen, qmail has essentially no pre-compilation configuration.

     2 You should never have to recompile it unless you want to change the

     3 qmail home directory, usernames, or uids.

     4 

     5 qmail does allow quite a bit of easy post-installation configuration. If

     6 you care how your machine greets other machines via SMTP, for example,

     7 you can put an appropriate line into /var/qmail/control/smtpgreeting.

     8 

     9 But this is all optional---if control/smtpgreeting doesn't exist, qmail

    10 will do something reasonable by default. You shouldn't worry much about

    11 configuration right now. You can always come back and tune things later.

    12 

    13 There's one big exception. You MUST tell qmail your hostname. Just run

    14 the config-fast script:

    15 

    16    # ./config-fast your.full.host.name

    17 

    18 config-fast puts your.full.host.name into control/me. It also puts it

    19 into control/locals and control/rcpthosts, so that qmail will accept

    20 mail for your.full.host.name.

    21 

    22 You can instead use the config script, which looks up your host name in

    23 DNS:

    24 

    25    # ./config

    26 

    27 config also looks up your local IP addresses in DNS to decide which

    28 hosts to accept mail for.

    29 

    30 (Why doesn't qmail do these lookups on the fly? This was a deliberate

    31 design decision. qmail does all its local functions---header rewriting,

    32 checking if a recipient is local, etc.---without talking to the network.

    33 The point is that qmail can continue accepting and delivering local mail

    34 even if your network connection goes down.)

    35 

    36 Next, read through FAQ for information on setting up optional features

    37 like masquerading. If you really want to learn right now what all the

    38 configuration possibilities are, see qmail-control.0.