qmail was created by Daniel J. Bernstein starting in December 1995 as a secure alternative to Sendmail. The last official release, qmail 1.03, came in 1998, after which Bernstein essentially abandoned active development while prohibiting modified distributions due to his license terms. For years, qmail users relied on collections of third-party patches to add features like SMTP AUTH, TLS, and large message support.

In 2007, when Bernstein placed qmail 1.03 in the public domain, the netqmail project consolidated the most important patches into a single meta-distribution. However, netqmail itself became abandoned after its last release on November 30, 2007.

In 2019, Amitai Schleier, a NetBSD contributor and longtime qmail administrator, founded the notqmail project to finally provide a properly maintained, community-driven successor. notqmail begins where netqmail left off, providing stable, compatible releases that integrate accumulated patches while maintaining backward compatibility with existing qmail configurations. The project explicitly aims to be a collaborative open-source project rather than a single-maintainer effort.

notqmail represents a rare case of a fork emerging over two decades after the original's last release. It demonstrates that important infrastructure software can accumulate a long tail of unofficial patches that eventually need consolidation into a maintained project. The fork addresses the governance vacuum left by a single-maintainer project whose author moved on.