This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 14:23:32 -0600 (MDT)
From: "Karl F. Larsen" <k5di@zianet.com>
To: John de la Garza <jdelagarza@designinsites.com>
Subject: Re: [svlug] MTA
I've been using linux for e-mail for 6 years and settled on the
use of sendmail, proctor and pine as THE simply best e-mail system ever
devised. If you look this message started on cannac.ampr.org which is
this computer. Cool...
On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, John de la Garza wrote:
> I am trying to set up elm. I have fetchmail working fine.
>
> I am using a standalone home computer with a dialup connection.
>
> Should I be using sendmail or smail? I am trying to make this a learning
> experience.
>
> I was looking for some feedback on what most people use for their mta on
> home computers...
>
> thanks,
>
> johnd
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> svlug mailing list
> svlug@lists.svlug.org
> http://lists.svlug.org/mailman/listinfo/svlug
>
>
Yours Truly,
- Karl F. Larsen, k5di@arrl.net (505) 524-3303 -
===
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 16:05:19 -0700
To: John de la Garza <jdelagarza@designinsites.com>
Cc: "Svlug (E-mail)" <svlug@lists.svlug.org>
Subject: Re: [svlug] MTA
From: Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net>
On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 09:47:53AM -0700, John de la Garza wrote:
> Should I be using sendmail or smail? I am trying to make this a learning
> experience.
No.
Speaking as a programmer who is NOT a sysadmin, I found both sendmail
and smail completely unusable (read: after trying for months, I still
couldn't get either one to work). Fortunately, exim and postfix are
both simple and easy to use, maintain, and configure.
Sendmail may be a good choice (this is debatable) if you're setting up
a network for hundreds of users. For one home user (or even three or
four like me), it's grotesque overkill. It's like using apache on
your home system (another package I avoid like the plague). Basically,
a complete waste of resources.
I recently saw someone on the list talk about how much easier the new
sendmail was to configure. The example looked like some obscure,
baroque mess that only a professional sysadmin could love. Some
people have no sense of perspective. Stick with exim or postfix is my
advice. :-)
cheers
--
Chris Waters xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
or xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
| this .signature file.
===
From: "David E. Fox" <dfox@belvdere.vip.best.com>
To: Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net>
Subject: Re: [svlug] MTA
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 21:47:55 -0700
Cc: svlug@svlug.org
On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, you wrote:
> Speaking as a programmer who is NOT a sysadmin, I found both sendmail
> and smail completely unusable (read: after trying for months, I still
If you want to do standard things, sendmail needn't be that difficult to set
up. Smail is easier, and better suited (at least in my limited experience,
not being either a professional programmer nor sysadmin, but playing with my
own box for some years) for uucp when you have some other host that is your
'smart' host (i.e., it does the dirty work for you).
If one uses fetchmail, then perhaps sendmail is somewhat overkill, but it
works OK for plain local mail delivery. Over here, I have it set up to accept
mail for two different domains (belvedere.sbay.org as well as
belvdere.vip.best.com) even though 99% of my stuff these days comes through
fetchmail.
> four like me), it's grotesque overkill. It's like using apache on
> your home system (another package I avoid like the plague). Basically,
> a complete waste of resources.
Probably. Other mailers (which I haven't tried, besides smail) may use fewer
resources. Usually, you need a separate sendmail process for each piece of
mail going through the system, so if you have hundreds of users sending mail,
conceivably you might have many simultaneous sendmail processes running at
any one time. Since Linux shares memory, this doesn't have a whole lot of
impact, but it does have some, of course.
I have apache running by default here. It's more or less set up, but there's
little if any content - it's basically what you get when you set Redhat up
out of the box. Redhat is more agressive with httpd than are other
distributions probably -- it starts up six or eight separate httpd processes
on boot. Again, using shared memory, they don't impact quite that much, and
don't really consume much resources. On my system, these are some of the
first processes to be swapped out, since they are used very little.
Sure, I could save some resources by not having httpd loaded.
>
> I recently saw someone on the list talk about how much easier the new
> sendmail was to configure. The example looked like some obscure,
> baroque mess that only a professional sysadmin could love. Some
Most of sendmail.cf is a baroque mess. Especially, stuff like rewriting
rules. But the first part of the file is not all that difficult to figure
out, although it helps to have a good starting point, such as an example
working sendmail.cf you can then tweak. Plus, many if not most of the
sendmail.cf options have comments, so you don't have to know what Dw or
whatever means -- you just read what the comment says it means and see what
it is already set to.
Last I configured smail, though, it had about six lines to configure. Not too
terribly difficult. But you lose (perhaps; I haven't checked out newer
versions) the ability to do things like reject mail from spammers, although
that really makes more sense if you get your mail SMTP directly to you and
not POP, like most people do.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Fox Thanks for letting me
dfox@belvdere.vip.best.com change magnetic patterns
David.Fox@icp.siemens.com on your hard disk.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
===
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 23:04:25 -0700
From: "Jeremy D. Zawodny" <jzawodn@yahoo-inc.com>
To: "David E. Fox" <dfox@belvdere.vip.best.com>
Cc: Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net>, svlug@svlug.org
Subject: Re: [svlug] MTA
On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 09:47:55PM -0700, David E. Fox wrote:
> Most of sendmail.cf is a baroque mess. Especially, stuff like
> rewriting rules. But the first part of the file is not all that
> difficult to figure out, although it helps to have a good starting
> point, such as an example working sendmail.cf you can then
> tweak. Plus, many if not most of the sendmail.cf options have
> comments, so you don't have to know what Dw or whatever means -- you
> just read what the comment says it means and see what it is already
> set to.
As Derek already pointed out, you really shouldn't have to muck with
/etc/sendmail.cf anymore. Virtually everything can be configured via
m4 macros now.
Granted, it's not the easiest thing in the world the first time, but
after you've done it once it takes little effort.
Jeremy
--
Jeremy D. Zawodny, <jzawodn@yahoo-inc.com>
Technical Yahoo - Yahoo Finance
Desk: (408) 328-7878 Fax: (408) 530-5454
Cell: (408) 439-9951
===