On Wed, Jul 01, 1998 at 04:47:48PM -0400, Richard A Nelson wrote: > First, I guess I should mention that I'm new to Debian - I'm mostly an IBM > mainframe assembler guy for 16+ years (call be Bob, but don't give me > COBOL). My temperment seems to run along the same stream as some of the > (more experienced) sendmail users I've heard from ;-} Oh, I'm definetly > no sendmail guru - I use it and enjoy learning - thats why I picked it up.
My condolances. May you never see another line of COBOL so long as you live. > I wasn't here for the problems that led to sensible-mda, but can easily > understand the problems with a rich distribution wherein the MTA and MDA > aren't closely coupled. And as far as I know, sendmail seems to be the > only MTA so unencumbered (or flexible to be a bit more polite). I may be out of my league here since qmail uses by default |preline procmail as its default delivery agent and therefore REQUIRES procmail for the sake of delivering to the mailbox policy calls for, BUT. > sensible-mda has been updated to solve one incarnation of 23000: > * Both deliver and procmail are installed > * procmail is non-functionally-good as an MDA (by virtue of not being > suid) > * deliver is the preferred MDA (because of the above bullet) > > This, however, doesn't address the case wherein both MDA are installed and > suitable for sendmail's use ... and yet deliver is to be preferred. The > only way to solve this is to change sendmail.mc. The last time I used procmail was before hamm was frozen. I did not at that time know there was a sensable-mda, procmail was not used even though it had been installed. A feature line in the .mc file would have sendmail use procmail, which is what I did. > Prior to sensible-mda (as I have inferred from its presence and comments > on this thread). The state was: > * sendmail would have to co-req a specific MDA (deliver or procmail) Currently the qmail package (built from qmail-src in non-free/mail) does this and requires procmail. > With sensible-mda, > * sendmail co-req either MDA > * whichever one is installed is automagically used > * IFF both are extant, procmail is preferred > * to change from deliver to procmail, one needs to > - install the new MDA > - remove the old MDA (optionally) > * to change from procmail to deliver, one needs to > - follow the steps delineated in the prior to sensible-mda bullet > above If I may, why is sensable-mda not an /etc/alternatives thing? If not present, sendmail is able to deliver itself and if present it should use the MDA which scores the highest on update-alternatives OR local admin's choice of MDA. procmail, deliver, and mailagent(? I've not used..) should all be alternatives for sensible-mda and ranked probably procmail, mailagent, deliver by default. (Sorry Manoj, but procmail is less of a surprise as an MDA than mailagent IMO..) Thoughts? Corrections?
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