[Gllug] Linux directory conventions

[Jason Clifford]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Mike Brodbelt wrote:

> > When I was setting up UKFSN (and UKPOST before that) I had a specific set 
> > of features I wanted to offer, including unlimited real mailboxes under 
> > each domain that would have common names - ie joe at example1.com and 
> > joe at example2.com would be delivered to the joe mailbox in each domain.
> > 
> > Sendmail didn't (and still doesn't) support this.
> 
> Sendmail shouldn't have to. It's an MTA, and this falls into the purview
> of your mail store. If you want the above to work, just have sendmail
> hand the messages off to a store the supports virtual domains, like
> Cyrus 2.2. Of course you can make the above work even without a sensible
> store, but it would be a bad plan....

I disagree. I want the MTA to be able to make informed decisions about 
whether a message is valid at the point the message enters my network.

If someone connects to our mail server and offers a message for a 
non-existant address having knowledge of the virtual users in the MTA 
allows you to refuse the message properly rather than getting stuck with 
zombie bounce messages as a result of accepting it when you should not 
have.

I looked at Cyrus and rejected it - I'm running an ISP not an office mail 
server and IMAP encourages people to leave mail on the server which I 
don't want.

Cyrus is also a far more complicated system than I want to be managing for 
an ISP.

> Sendmail has a rule engine that's more configurable than anything else.

I accept this - I've written my own rulesets in sendmail - however very 
few sendmail admins are capable of writing their own rulesets. That's the 
reason m4 is the usual route to building a sendmail.cf file now.

> Ah. So learning sendmail is arcane, but writing your own UUCP transport
> in perl isn't????

Yes it is however if you are going to argue that learning sendmail's 
arcana makes sendmail better then I am entitled to respond that perl is 
easier ;)

> Nothing against postfix (or exim, or anything else), but theres an awful
> lot of sendmail bashing that's utterly unwarranted. If you don't want to
> use it, fine, but people shouldn't claim it lacks features that other
> MTAs have when this is just not the case.

It is the case in the instance I mentioned which is really important to 
*me*.

I don't deny that sendmail is a very good MTA - I've used it for years and 
I still do the occassional bit of consulting for sendmail users.

I would not however recommend that anyone wanting a simple, realiable MTA 
use it now - the alternatives are better for most such people whether that 
means postfix, exim or qmail (subject to the usual djb warning).

The only other comment on that though is that if you ever need to read the 
source to debug a problem (yes, been there too) you'll really regret 
choosing sendmail. 

Jason Clifford
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