On Sat, 2006-02-18 at 03:18, Peter J. Holzer wrote: > > > > Yes, but what's the point in duplicating features in free > > software? > > Scratching itches. I've been using sendmail for a long time, and I liked > it less and less the longer I used it. There are a lot of options and > features which sometimes interact in wierd ways, and if you need things > which the sendmail authors haven't anticipated (or which you can't > find in the README.cf) you have to write sendmail macros, which - for me > - are plainly write only. It did itch me, and the itch was growing > over the years.
That was all true until the milter interface worked reliably. Now if you can't do what you want by pasting a few well-known lines into sendmail.mc to expand the canned macros that handle most transport-related needs, you write a milter in a language of your choice that runs under a uid of your choice, does the processing you want in realtime to control the smtp conversation and whatever else you want it to do. > Qpsmtpd was perfect for me: It is small. It is written and extended > in perl, which is a language I use daily, and not in an arcane pattern > substitution language which I need only once every couple of years. MimeDefang give you exactly the same thing. It hooks itself in as a milter, provides functions for all the operations you are likely to want, and gives you one small snippet of perl where you control what happens and can add any local code you need. > It > is only an SMTP server, and not also an SMTP client, MDA, queue manager, > etc. It has a nice plugin system. So I can simply make it do what I want > in an hour or an afternoon, and - most importantly - understand what I > have done a year later. The milter operation only happens during the smtp conversations, so sendmail is on it's own for queuing which it handles at least reasonably well and it already hooks your choice of program for local delivery. > It scratched my itch. But today, it wouldn't be necessary unless you needed the backend delivery for postfix or qmail. Actually, I run mine on an internet relay machine that does no local delivery anyway - it just forwards things that pass the spam and virus checks to another machine that happens to also run sendmail but that could be anything else. Qpsmtpd does seem like a neat idea - it just doesn't look as mature as mimedefang or as complete as current sendmail+mimedefang. I'm not saying anyone should switch but just that you are likely to have to solve a lot of the same problems and it might be worth looking at how it has already been done. At least glance through the mail list archives to see the problems that have come up and think about how qpsmtpd will handle the same situations. And there's still the option to run mimedefang itself through qpsmtpd's milter interface which might not be difficult if someone has time to try it. -- Les Mikesell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
