zeeff@b-tech.UUCP (04/11/87)
After working with smail 2.3 a few hours, I have a few initial thoughts.
It installs easily on a Sys V.2 system w/o sendmail and generally
works well. My thanks to the authors.
One thing I don't like is the aliasing - as stated in the docs, it
doesn't handle mail to programs or files. More importantly, it
doesn't handle errors in delivering to aliases the way I think it
should. Take a situation where jim@xvax sends mail to foovax!group
where group expands to a list of 10 people. If one of the people in
the group can't be reached, jim@xvax will receive an error message
that he probably won't understand. I claim that jim@xvax did nothing
wrong - he correctly addressed his mail and it was successfully
delivered to foovax!group. The maintainer of the alias "group" should
receive the error message. I can see situations where jim@xvax might
want to be notified, but in a mailing list situation, this behavior
would not be well received. I intend to have the local delivery agent
handle aliases.
Smail also doesn't seem to understand % in addresses (ie. xxx%yyy@zzz
gets sent to zzz!xxx%yyy. Right or wrong, I do see % used.
Please, nonflame comments/corrections only.
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Jon Zeeff Branch Technology, Ann Arbor, MI
seismo!umix!b-tech!zeeff zeeff%b-tech.uucp@umix.cc.umich.edu