sveer@sssab.se (Sven L Eriksson) (11/28/90)
I'm looking for a mailer that doesn't demand too much knowledge or work by the system administrator. Does anyone know about any such thing? I have looked at sendmail, smail-3 and smail-2.5. Sendmail is very powerful but if an experienced person needs 5 days to understand its documentation and try out a configuration that suits his site, how long will it take a less experienced person? I have seen the IDA-kit. It's nice but only for people who already understand sendmail. The people we deliver to will never have the background knowledge, the time or the motivation to learn sendmail. Smail 2.5 is easier. Just the aliases-file and a paths-file is needed. The paths file does the routing I need. (I don't have the large maps so I fill in paths manually. Just name the neighbours and a smarthost.) But Smail 2.5 cannot do anything but local delivery and remote delivery via UUCP. We have managed to teach this to some of our customers. Smail 3.xx is promising. It does all we dream about and more. It's easier to work with than sendmail, but it uses a lot of description files. We can provide a standard configuration for our costumers but it is still too complex. And it has a GNU copyleft. (We want to adapt the mailer to the rest of our environment which we don't want to be free.) Are there any more mailers I don't know of and that can be interresting? We are discussing to write a new mailer that solves our problems. It would use the old aliases-file with the abilities of sendmail and smail-3. For connections to the world we invented an alias file for nodes (or domains). This file will be very similar to the user aliases- file but the left hand names are node names and domains. Delivery to remote nodes are made using programs. An example: node.dom.ain : | uux - node!rmail <recipient> will send mail to user@node.dom.ain via UUCP. The <recipient> is a magic word for the user address. Similarly mail via SMTP can be delivered with a smtp program. This is the principle. To further enhance this mailer we need regular expressions and command substitution for some tasks. I.e: Mail to hosts "host-a" and "host-b" shall be routed through "host-c" /host-a|host-b/ : | uux - host-c!rmail <recipient> And if you want the mailer to check with the UUCP system for known UUCP hosts: /`uuname`/.UUCP : | uux - $1!rmail <recipient> $1 is a notation for the first reg-exp used. In this case this reg-exp involves a command substitution. All words produced by this command are interpreted as alternatives as /host-a|host-b|...|host-n/. $1 expands to the matched word. With this mechanism a lot of work may be done. Magic aliases should be well commented or maybe hidden somehow. It is also possible to put a front end with a nice user inteface for this file. Is anybody interrested in such a mailer? If there does not exist any simple mailer we must create it our selves. If people are interrested we will put this in the public domain (with #ifdef's for code inter- facing with our own environment). / Sven Eriksson -- - Sven L Eriksson, 3S AB (Scandinavian System Support AB) o O___ - Address: Agatan 4, Box 535, S-581 05 Linkoping, Sweden _][__|o| - Phone: +46-13-11 16 60 Fax: +46-13-11 51 93 <_______|- - Email: sveer@sssab.se UUCP: uunet!sunic!sssab!sveer O-O-O
rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) (11/29/90)
In article <tl9tgb1gcC@herkules.sssab.se> sveer@sssab.se (Sven L Eriksson) writes: >I'm looking for a mailer that doesn't demand too much knowledge or >work by the system administrator. Does anyone know about any such thing? > >I have looked at sendmail, smail-3 and smail-2.5. Sendmail is very >powerful but if an experienced person needs 5 days to understand its >documentation and try out a configuration that suits his site, how >long will it take a less experienced person? I have seen the IDA-kit. >It's nice but only for people who already understand sendmail. Have another look at sendmail/IDA. If you prepare a running system for your users with a MAILERTABLE, possibly a PATHTABLE, and with PSEUDONYMS defined to be a file name, then they could do almost everything they would ever need simply by adding additional local aliases to the PSEUDONYMS file, or changing one or two entries in MAILERTABLE or PATHTABLE for changing routes. Then a 'make' would change everything that needed to be changed. They would never need to understand anything about configuring sendmail. -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science <rickert@cs.niu.edu> Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115. +1-815-753-6940
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (12/01/90)
In article <tl9tgb1gcC@herkules.sssab.se> sveer@sssab.se (Sven L Eriksson) writes: >I'm looking for a mailer that doesn't demand too much knowledge or >work by the system administrator. Does anyone know about any such thing? >Smail 2.5 is easier. >But Smail 2.5 cannot do anything but local delivery and >remote delivery via UUCP. If you don't need SMTP, you might consider using deliver along with with Smail 2.5 for more flexible delivery options without adding a lot of complexity. >Smail 3.xx is promising. It does all we dream about and more. It's easier >to work with than sendmail, but it uses a lot of description files. >We can provide a standard configuration for our costumers but it is still >too complex. And it has a GNU copyleft. (We want to adapt the mailer to >the rest of our environment which we don't want to be free.) I like Smail 3 and would recommend it for most situations. You should be able to avoid any GNUish complications by arranging your billing such that you do not sell the product but instead charge for installing it. That is, you are not distributing the code but instead acting on behalf of the customer to obtain it for them. > node.dom.ain : | uux - node!rmail <recipient> > /host-a|host-b/ : | uux - host-c!rmail <recipient> > /`uuname`/.UUCP : | uux - $1!rmail <recipient> I don't see how this is any easier than the smail 3 syntax for the same functionality and it would quickly become cumbersome for a large number of hosts. Les Mikesell les@chinet.chi.il.us
david@twg.com (David S. Herron) (12/08/90)
In article <tl9tgb1gcC@herkules.sssab.se> sveer@sssab.se (Sven L Eriksson) writes: >I'm looking for a mailer that doesn't demand too much knowledge or >work by the system administrator. Does anyone know about any such thing? Well.. Shoot.. That leaves out MMDF, in its current state it's not a trivially administered system. So I don't get to pontificate on that. Ohwell.. You might think about writing some configuration management software for an existing mailer rather than writing a new mailer. I've recently done this and, believe me, it's easier than writing a new mailer! >... Sendmail is very >powerful but if an experienced person needs 5 days ... ... >Smail 2.5 is easier. Just the aliases-file and a paths-file ... >... But Smail 2.5 cannot do anything but local delivery and >remote delivery via UUCP.... ... >Smail 3.xx is promising. It does all we dream about and more.... >... And it has a GNU copyleft. (We want to adapt the mailer to >the rest of our environment which we don't want to be free.) Hmm.. Can't you include smail 3.x as a seperate package/product? >Are there any more mailers I don't know of and that can be interresting? Other than MMDF, no. To complete the survey .. MMDF is very powerful. It isn't easy to learn, and would take an experienced person some time to learn and configure for the local environment. The problem, though, is mostly one of (lack of) documentation, than ease of configuring the system. Once you know MMDF it's pretty easy easy to work with.. It helps that, as I see it, MMDF has a better overall *design* than any of the others. For instance, sendmail treats addresses as simple character strings, but in fact addresses have a lot of structure within them. MMDF treats addresses as a data structure which just happens to fit very closely to an RFC-822 source route, and can easily be converted to a "pure" UUCP source route. But since it's a data structure the programs which manipulate it are in C. Another good feature, which has some bearing on your proposed mailer design, has to do with the routing. In your proposed design you have a one-stage lookup of domain name -> route. In MMDF this is split into two stages: 1) name resolution & canonicalization, and 2) route determination. These really are two different sorts of things. Mixing them together into one pile of information simply makes things confusing. Name resolution: For instance .. full.dom.ain: full.dom.ain full.dom: full.dom.ain full: full.dom.ain Would provide mappings from "full.dom.ain", "full.dom" and "full" to "full.dom.ain". This isn't quite the way MMDF does it ... If you want it to be a route ... full.dom.ain: full.dom.ain, route-last, ..., route-first would make MMDF route the mail like route-first!...!route-last!full.dom.ain!user or <@route-first,...,@route-last:user@full.dom.ain> Route determination: You work only with full domain names in the table(s) for this. On the LHS you list domain names you want to do routing for & on the RHS you list information used in the routing. Using this two-step method you can easily have multiple names channeled through one entry in the routing file. > Delivery to remote nodes are made using programs. An example: > > node.dom.ain : | uux - node!rmail <recipient> Or: domain-file: node.dom.ain: node.dom.ain routing-file: node.dom.ain: | uux - node!rmail <recipient> How about using a "$(name)" form to substitute values? "printf" format strings don't necessarily work well because `%' is a routing character for some mail systems. > /host-a|host-b/ : | uux - host-c!rmail <recipient> I think this looks ugly.. Especially if you were to be processing pathalias output & tried to put all the hosts handled by one of your neighbors into one regex..! >And if you want the mailer to check with the UUCP system for known UUCP >hosts: > > /`uuname`/.UUCP : | uux - $1!rmail <recipient> Why would you need to do this? Instead, every time you edit your Systems (L.sys) file -- or possibly every day/hour/week -- you run a script like uuname|awk '{print $1 ": " $1 ".uucp"; print $1 ".uucp: " $s ".uucp"}' uuname | awk '{print $1 ".uucp: | uux - " $1 "!rmail <recipiend>"}' and installs those into your domain & routing tables as appropriate? You get the *same* information without having to run uuname all day long. A table lookup, especially with a dbm-hashed database, is a *LOT* cheaper than running a process.. >$1 is a notation for the first reg-exp used. In this case this reg-exp >involves a command substitution. All words produced by this command are >interpreted as alternatives as /host-a|host-b|...|host-n/. $1 expands >to the matched word. Careful .. you're heading down the same rosy path that sendmail went down. -- <- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <david@twg.com> <- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <david@ms.uky.edu> <- <- "bnews must die" -- From: Rick Adams <rick@uunet.uu.net>