On Thu, 2003-01-16 at 12:08, Brian Ashe wrote: > On Thursday January 16, 2003 02:33, Gordon Messmer wrote: > > The problem is largely in that sendmail uses mbox files, and a couple of > > users leave mail on the server though they're told not to, and they eat > > all of the disk bandwidth (every mail check reads and then re-writes > > their entire mail spool). > > I believe that's a misconception. Unlike qmail/exim/postfix, sendmail does not > do local delivery. It hands it off to procmail. On a default RH install > promail is set up to use mbox because the IMAP/POP server included (UW-IMAP) > doesn't by default support maildir.
I know that. I normally refer to the combination of Sendmail and procmail as just "Sendmail" (sorta the way many people refer to GNU/Linux as just Linux). Sendmail is pretty much always installed with procmail, and is mostly useless without it, or a similar agent. To be free of misconceptions, I'll say this: The performance problems we have are a result of the POP server we use (Qpopper) in combination with mbox files and users choosing to leave their mail on the server. Sendmail+procmail appends new mail on the spool, the users check their mail, and Qpopper has to copy the whole spool to a temporary file, mark the downloaded messages as read, and then move the temp file into place over the spool. This results in reading the entire spool (sometimes hundreds of megs) and re-writing the whole thing every time the user checks their mail. Maildirs avoid all of that problem. > By replacing the IMAP/POP server (ie. qpopper, Courier, etc.) you can set up > procmail to use maildir and the performance should get better. It might be, but sendmail's queueing is slow, its security is bad, and its configuration is absolutely horrible. I'd rather switch out the whole thing for something better. -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
