[Gllug] Linux directory conventions

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 20:34, Jason Clifford wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Mike Brodbelt wrote:

> > 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.

It can.

> 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.

So set the users up in some kind of map that sendmail can consult.
There's no shortage of typed - Berkeley DB, LDAP, flat text, whatever.

> 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 has a POP daemon - it's easy to turn off IMAP. It also has a sigle
instance store which I'd have thought would be invaluable for an ISP.
And you can charge extra for IMAP :-).

> 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.

Even custom rules/rulesets can (and usually should) be bunged in
sendmail.mc or a separate m4 file that you can include.

> > 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 really don't thaink you've made a good case that sendmail can't do
what you want. I'll freely accept you may have a preference for
something else, just not (thus far) on the basis of features.

> 
> 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. 

On the occasions I've wandered through sendmail source it's not seemed
notably worse than many other bits of open source code I've looked at.

Mike.


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