Well, it's over now. I've put the linode to rest and cloned a new one.

I think that the whole problem was the thing with using ' instead of `. We'll see if I'm right within a few minutes I hope.

Not sure what I did to it the first time but whatever I did it wasn't happy. It being my linode. I've just spent the last 3 or 4 hours doing a complete re-install of apache / mysql / and qmail. So far so good. I'm able to send and receive and none of the problems I had earlier are there.

I'm thinking that the script syntax errors caused some kind of permission setting to get messed up on the queue but I also think that I may have installed a package that caused an error with my compilers which messed up a whole lot of things. I'm really liking my linode right now.

"make setup" from the qmail source directory should rebuild your mail queue, fixing any permission or other problems.

I've never used with queue-fix, but odds are that you'll find
extern int errno;
somewhere in the source, replace it with
#include <errno.h>

If you do end up reinstalled, I'd _highly_ suggest using the directions at lifewithqmail.org. These directions are "newbie proof" and if you ever want to get support from the qmail mailing list, this is almost a requirement.