Yesterday, the port download for a new version of vpopmail became available. The new version had been reported as available for several days, but none of the download sites would respond.  The new port built without error.

Everything seemed aok until I noticed vdelivermail dumping core every time it was called upon to deliver an email. This failure effectively halted all domain related email.

After several hours tweaking build options the problem went unresolved and I was forced to conclude that a software bug was the culprit.

Vpopmail is written and maintained by Inter7, a company out of Illinois that specializes in servicing and maintaining Qmail. I had not called upon Inter7 for a number of years since I had been disappointed in their installation methods. They had previously installed Qmail and Spamassasin on one of my servers by uploading a tarball consisting of precompiled binaries which left me with an installation that I could not maintain with the ports system.

According to their website their business hour rates are $120/hour and their after hours rate comes in at a cool $205/hour.  So I waited for them to open up at 9am CST and gave them a call. I was informed that they could work on the problem immediately for an extra $100 or that I could wait until after their department meeting. Ha! I’ve been down for nearly a day, what’s another hour?

So they called up after their morning meeting and I helped them login to my server. It took all of 5 minutes to fix the problem. Apparently I was correct and that there was a software bug that was causing the problem which was fixed by uploading the latest version of the software and rebuilding it.

Since the problem was clearly Inter7’s fault I felt entitled to ask them to waive any service charge. Of course, my request was flatly denied.

Inter7 informed me that the bug fix would soon be available in the next release. Pretty slick business model, put out a buggy release, get users to call up for support, charge them an arm and a leg, and never blink an eye about how their sloppy release procedures caused my email server to go down for a day.

So, by all means, do not install Vpopmail release 5.4.28!