From source, on a single host

Fetch the latest release in your preferred archive format.

Life with qmail continues to apply. Note that some modern systems -- we've seen at least OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Void Linux -- don't provide nroff. mandoc or GNU troff (aka groff) should do the trick. Please also review our notes about patches.

From source, to many hosts

notqmail makes it easy to build once, install many.

On the build host

Customize conf-users and conf-groups, if needed, and note the names. Then build, stage, and create a tarball:

$ make it man
$ export DESTDIR=/path/to/staging/directory
$ make package
$ tar -C ${DESTDIR} -czf notqmail-bin-VERSION.tar.gz .

On an install host

Copy over notqmail-bin-VERSION.tar.gz, instchown, and instcheck from the build host. Extract the tarball -- e.g., with GNU Tar:

# tar -C / --no-overwrite-dir -xzf notqmail-bin-VERSION.tar.gz

Create users and groups with names to match the build. Set permissions on installed files:

# ./instchown

Then verify the installation, just as with a traditional qmail install:

# ./instcheck

From vendor packages

Binary packages for many RPM and DEB based distributions are provided through OpenBuildService.

pkgsrc

$ cd mail/qmail && make install

or on platforms with recent binary packages available,

# pkg_add qmail