*BSD News Article 85120


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Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.smail,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.lava.net!news-w.ans.net!newsfeeds.ans.net!news.mci.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.mindspring.com!mindspring!uunet!in1.uu.net!208.192.224.3!news.interactive.net!bet
From: bet@interactive.net (Bennett Todd)
Subject: Re: Sendmail vs. Smail...
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References: <57tf61$gq7@raven.eva.net> <58h6r1$8ik@ezekiel.eunet.ie> <1996Dec1005.15.53.2968@koobera.math.uic.edu> <58mchc$d6o@ezekiel.eunet.ie> <1996Dec1121.15.26.13717@koobera.math.uic.edu> <58ntsj$t67@telesys.tnet.com>
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Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 14:25:01 GMT
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On 11 Dec 1996 20:24:03 -0700, Kevin W. Reed <kreed@tnet.com> wrote:
>djb@koobera.math.uic.edu (D. J. Bernstein) writes:
>>What percentage of your mail volume consists of messages with 10
>>recipients on the same system?
>
>Obviously you have never run a large mailing list.  On our systems with
>Mailing lists on them, a large percentage do.

Starting a sentence off with "Obviously" doesn't make it true. Show some
evidence. Document an example where qmail's strategy will load a network link
more heavily than your favourite. Or a case where qmail will take longer to
get the traffic through. Please --- if you can produce such an example, do
lob some facts into this fantasizing. As it stands, Dan has repeatedly cited
quantitative measurements, and people disagreeing with him are sticking to
their principles, and apparently unconcerned about facts. Prove him wrong.

>Qmail doesn't support UUCP Bang paths as well which a site that supports
>those types of connections requires.

UUCP email transport has supported domain names properly since the mid-80s
sometime (when did pathalias start working really properly?). A strict "!"
path is not a useable address in most circumstances; the name at the front of
the path is a relative UUCP name, not guaranteed unique. However, hybrid names
of the form host!host!...!user@domain.name should work fine --- and be
supported by qmail --- even though they are fragile and poor. Far better for a
UUCP-connected site to get a couple of pathalias-running forwarders to list
them with MX records. The point: if you want to make supporting ! paths a
requirement, well hell, have a fun time, it's your computer. But don't expect
the rest of us to do anything more than laugh; that makes about as much sense
as making a requirement of supporting x.400, or Lotus Notes, or JES2/HASP.
Such protocols may make sense in particular ghettoes, but support for them has
no place in an internet MTA; it urgently needs to be localized in a gateway.

-Bennett