[1700] in RedHat Linux List
Re: [NON-redhat specific] Mailer Daemons WAS: Re: Have I been kicked
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wierdl Mate)
Tue Oct 29 19:16:20 1996
To: Daniel Chalef <danielc@iafrica.com>
cc: redhat-list@redhat.com
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 29 Oct 1996 22:25:03 +0200."
<Pine.LNX.3.95.961029222058.8021C-100000@boris.iafrica.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 19:13:56 -0600
From: Wierdl Mate <matyi@wierdlmpc.msci.memphis.edu>
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
> I haven't asked our mail gurus, but how do qmail, smail, sendmail compare?
> What are the benefits?
What I like about qmail is that any user without the intervention of a
sysadm can set up a mailinglist in seconds. This was the initial
reason why I got it: four of us are organizing three different
meetings, and setting up a mailing list for each makes life very easy.
The whole program is more user oriented/controlled (I wonder if
procmail is ever needed under qmail)
The gurus will tell you about other benefits of qmail (small, no
cryptic configuration like in sendmail, etc.)
Finally the author of qmail is (was?) a mathematician, which is kind'a
interesting.
Here is part of the author's ad
---------------------------------------
qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent.
It is meant as a replacement for the entire sendmail-binmail system on
typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts.
Secure: Security isn't just a goal, but an absolute requirement. Mail
delivery is critical for users; it cannot be turned off, so it must be
completely secure. (This is why I started writing qmail: I was sick of
the security holes in sendmail and other MTAs.)
Reliable: qmail's straight-paper-path philosophy guarantees that a
message, once accepted into the system, will never be lost. qmail also
supports maildir, a new, super-reliable user mailbox format. Maildirs,
unlike mbox files and mh folders, won't be corrupted if the system
crashes during delivery. Even better, not only can a user safely read
his mail over NFS, but any number of NFS clients can deliver mail to him
at the same time.
Efficient: On a Pentium under BSD/OS, qmail can easily sustain 200000
local messages per day---that's separate messages injected and delivered
to mailboxes in a real test! Although remote deliveries are inherently
limited by the slowness of DNS and SMTP, qmail overlaps 20 simultaneous
deliveries by default, so it zooms quickly through mailing lists. (This
is why I finished qmail: I had to get a big mailing list set up.)
Simple: qmail is vastly smaller than any other Internet MTA. Some
reasons why: (1) Other MTAs have separate forwarding, aliasing, and
mailing list mechanisms. qmail has one simple forwarding mechanism that
lets users handle their own mailing lists. (2) Other MTAs offer a
spectrum of delivery modes, from fast+unsafe to slow+queued. qmail-send
is instantly triggered by new items in the queue, so the qmail system
has just one delivery mode: fast+queued. (3) Other MTAs include, in
effect, a specialized version of inetd that watches the load average.
qmail's design inherently limits the machine load, so qmail-smtpd can
safely run from your system's inetd.
Replacement for sendmail: qmail supports host and user masquerading,
full host hiding, virtual domains, null clients, list-owner rewriting,
relay control, double-bounce recording, arbitrary RFC 822 address lists,
cross-host mailing list loop detection, per-recipient checkpointing,
downed host backoffs, independent message retry schedules, etc. In
short, it's up to speed on modern MTA features. (If you need another
feature, let me know.) qmail includes a drop-in ``sendmail'' wrapper so
that it will be used transparently by your current UAs.
* qmail lets each user handle his own mailing lists. The delivery
instructions for user-whatever go into ~user/.qmail-whatever.
* qmail makes it really easy to set up mailing list owners. If the user
touches ~user/.qmail-whatever-owner, all bounces will come back to him.
* qmail supports the owner hack, which permits completely reliable
automated bounce handling for mailing lists of any size.
* SPEED---qmail blasts through mailing lists an order of magnitude
faster than sendmail. For example, one message was successfully
delivered to 150 hosts around the world in just 70 seconds, with qmail's
out-of-the-box configuration.
* qmail automatically prevents mailing list loops, even across hosts.
* qlist, included in the qmail package, deals with subscription requests
safely and automatically.
* qmail allows inconceivably gigantic mailing lists. No random limits.
* qmail handles aliasing and forwarding with the same simple mechanism.
For example, Postmaster is controlled by ~alias/.qmail-postmaster. This
means that cross-host loop detection also applies to aliases.
-----------------------------
Mate
M\'at\'e Wierdl
Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of Memphis,
E-mail: matyi@moni.msci.memphis.edu
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