les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (06/20/91)
I will soon be upgrading a group of SysVr3 machines to SysVr4. Should I consider using the native mailer instead of replacing it with Smail3 which I am using now? I need good alias, forwarding and list file handling. It looks like the SysVr4 mailer will do some of this, but can it match Smail at recursing through the aliases, forwards and lists until everything is resolved and the duplicates discarded? Les Mikesell les@chinet.chi.il.us
hansen@pegasus.att.com (Tony L. Hansen) (06/27/91)
< I will soon be upgrading a group of SysVr3 machines to SysVr4. Should I < consider using the native mailer instead of replacing it with Smail3 < which I am using now? I need good alias, forwarding and list file < handling. It looks like the SysVr4 mailer will do some of this, but < can it match Smail at recursing through the aliases, forwards and lists < until everything is resolved and the duplicates discarded? I believe that the SVr4 mail system can do everything that smail can do. Tony Hansen hansen@pegasus.att.com, tony@attmail.com att!pegasus!hansen, attmail!tony
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (06/29/91)
In article <1991Jun27.022340.15573@cbnewsk.att.com> hansen@pegasus.att.com (Tony L. Hansen) writes: >< I will soon be upgrading a group of SysVr3 machines to SysVr4. Should I >< consider using the native mailer instead of replacing it with Smail3 >< which I am using now? I need good alias, forwarding and list file >< handling. It looks like the SysVr4 mailer will do some of this, but >< can it match Smail at recursing through the aliases, forwards and lists >< until everything is resolved and the duplicates discarded? >I believe that the SVr4 mail system can do everything that smail can do. Smail3 is very different from smail2.5. It includes things like basing the transport method on way that the address was identified, grouping messages within specified bounds for a single execution of the transport, etc. A quick test shows the the SysVr4 mailer does weed out duplicates when doing alias expansion, but it isn't happy with aliases that expand user to localmachine!user which is no problem for smail3. It might be possible to fix this, but the grouping seems to be more of a problem. I can't see any way to control the delivery such that a 100 user mailing list is delivered with the fewest possible executions of uux. Likewise, most of my users are on a LAN using PMX-Starmail and I want to notify them when mail comes in. The pmxstarnotify program is pretty slow and consumes a lot of resources. It used to totally destroy the machine when a list was delivered using the mailsurr file that ran pmxstarnotify in the background for each recipient. Also, I don't see any way to continue processing after noting that the local-address is not a user name. With smail3 you can make a list handler expand a list after checking for valid user names so it is fairly safe to allow anyone to create a mailing list (i.e. they can't divert a real user's mail). Les Mikesell les@chinet.il.us