2009/5/2 <ciscoad...@mail.ru>: ... > Tell me, please, are there any reasons not to use mail.local > from /usr/src/gnu/usr.sbin/sendmail? Or maybe there is another > LMTP capable local mailer in OpenBSD...
The OpenBSD mail.local will never return EX_TEMPFAIL, so the "repeated delivery to a given user" issue that Nick refers to in his book can't occur. In all the situations where other versions of mail.local would return EX_TEMPFAIL, the OpenBSD versions simply returns normal failure which will be treated as a permanent failure by sendmail and the message will be bounced instead of being (re)queued. So what situations does that cover? Well, other versions return EX_TEMPFAIL in such cases as out of memory, too many files, too many processes, reached disk quota limit, out of disk space, etc. If you're concerned about bouncing messages in those cases, then you should consider switching to a different local delivery agent. Possibilities include the sendmail mail.local (though I have not personally tested it on OpenBSD) or various programs that are in ports/packages, such as maildrop and procmail. The latter two also offer extended user-level filtering capabilities which you may find useful. I know the sendmail mail.local program and procmail both supports LMTP, but lack of LMTP support shouldn't necessarily rule out a delivery agent: do you actually have enough messages with multiple recipients for them to create an issue? If your machine only sees a handful of messages each day with multiple recipients, then who cares that they require a process per user to deliver? Verify that it's an issue before making it a deciding factor in your selection of delivery agent. Philip Guenther (Disclaimer: I maintained procmail for several years and wrote the LMTP support and now work for Sendmail, Inc, though not on the open source components.)
