qmail - ok
spamassassin - ok
imap server - ok
horde webmail - ok
finally! all this stuff is built out and working properly.
spamassassin was semi-functional for a while (mostly working but spitting out errors and not consistently setting headers on spam messages), and today i decided i just needed to wipe all traces of spamassassin from the server and start fresh with the latest & greatest. it worked.
for future reference, it was installed via CPAN, not via apt-get or source. hopefully that knowledge will make it at least slightly more maintainable going forward.
i only have two more domains relying on the old rackforce server as a DNS server, and two sites hosted there. once migrated i can finally get rid of that old server. yay.
the ironic thing is that the setup that is running on this server would run perfectly on my old virtual server. the old server sucks because the hosting company requires running PSA and all kinds of other high-overhead services even if you don't want or need them. and configuring a system using a mix of manual config files and PSA-controlled configuration can get messy. changes get overwritten, things that have always worked suddenly stop working, upgrades to shared components cause all kinds of problems.. ugh. i'm very glad to be on a server where i have mostly built and installed everything myself (eichlan did do some of the qmail install, but i'm now pretty familiar with his setup). there are a couple mail configuration things that aren't 100% automated, but I'm not really doing a high volume of new accounts, so a quick dot-qmail file for each new mail user isn't a big deal. if it becomes a big deal i can just write a script. :-)