[Gllug] Linux directory conventions

Mike Brodbelt mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk
Mon Nov 10 20:23:25 UTC 2003


On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 15:07, Jason Clifford 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....

>  OK you can achieve this 
> with "clever" procmail recipies but then you have to put together far more 
> complex systems and if you want people to be able to login as 
> joe at example1.com to POP3 or IMAP to collect their mail you have more 
> complication.

Procmail is often used to hack around inadequate backends. It can be
cool, but a properly designed mail system shouldn't need it.

> In the context of an Internet mail exchanger what does sendmail offer than 
> Postfix doesn't?
> 
> I know about UUCP but otherwise?

Sendmail has a rule engine that's more configurable than anything else.
Of course most people don't actually need the level of flexibility it
offers, but it's unquestionably far more flexible than *anything* else
out there.

> BTW - UUCP can be handled by postfix with a custom transport agent which 
> could be written in perl if necessary.

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

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.

Mike.


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