Qpopper POP3 Server on RedHat Linux 9

Written by Tony Bhimani
December 7, 2004

Requirements
RedHat Linux 9
Qpopper 4.0.5

In the Sendmail tutorial, we set up a single domain and mailbox. Sending mail is only half the equation so what about receiving it? That is where a POP3 server comes in. POP3 allows you to receive your mail with clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and others. We will be setting up the Qpopper POP3 server made by Qualcomm (the makers of Eudora). This tutorial covers downloading the source code and compiling it, so make sure you have the development tools installed (gcc, bison, flex, make, etc).

Make sure you are root and switch to your home directory. Create a directory called qpopper and move into it.

su -
[enter root password]
cd ~
mkdir qpopper
cd qpopper

Download the Qpopper source code from the Qualcomm FTP site using wget.

wget ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/servers/unix/popper/qpopper4.0.5.tar.gz

Unpack the source code and switch to the source directory. Issue these commands.

tar zxpf qpopper4.0.5.tar.gz
cd qpopper4.0.5

The configure script needs to be run before we can compile the source code. Execute the configure script to generate the Makefile's.

./configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man

Now that the Makefile's have been created, we can compile the source code. Run the make command.

make all

The last thing we have to do is install the executables.

make install

Qpopper should now be installed. We need to create a configuration file for Qpopper in /etc/xinetd.d so xinetd can manage our service. Switch over to the /etc/xinetd.d directory and use vi to create a new file called qpopper.

cd /etc/xinetd.d
vi qpopper

Go into insert mode (press i) and enter the following information in the qpopper file.

# qpopper POP3 server

service pop3
{
	disable		= no
	flags		= REUSE
	socket_type	= stream
	wait		= no
	user		= root
	server		= /usr/sbin/popper
	instances	= 50
	per_source	= 10
	log_on_failure	+= USERID
}

Save your changes and exit vi (press ESC, type :wq and press enter).

xinetd will be managing the Qpopper service. Restart xinetd to start the Qpopper service.

service xinetd restart

Let's see if Qpopper is running. You may or may not have nmap installed, so don't worry if you can't complete this step.

nmap localhost

POP3 (port 110) appears to be open. If you followed my Sendmail tutorial, then you should have an existing mailbox with a message sitting in it. We're going to telnet to port 110 and log into the mailbox. The mailbox I will log into is a Linux system account called webmaster. Replace webmaster with the mailbox name you'll be checking.

telnet localhost 110
user [account name]
pass [account password]

My message is still there. I won't be viewing it from telnet, but rather get it from my mail client. Type quit and press enter to end the POP3 session.

During my Sendmail tutorial, we configured the mailbox account in our client. I used Outlook Express whereas you may have used something else. POP3 at that point failed because we only set up the SMTP side of things. Now that we have Qpopper installed, check for new mail on that mailbox account.

Here is the message I replied to from my Hotmail account that was originally sent from Sendmail. Outlook Express downloaded the message from the webmaster mailbox. Qpopper works like a charm.

Setting up a Qpopper POP3 server was quite easy. POP3 is great when you are at home, but what if you want to check your mail while you are traveling? Aside from taking your laptop, will you have to keep setting up a mail client to check your mail remotely? Certainly not. The next tutorial will discuss the wonderful world of Web Email (aka Webmail). We will set up a popular open source webmail application called Squirrelmail. Stay tuned for that tutorial.

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