Re: portables, mail, and sporadic connectivity
In message <8Mhw1i1L1@sfere.elmail.co.uk>, Richard Kettlewell writes:
>Craig Metz writes:
>>Ian Jackson writes:
>>>Don't use Sendmail. Use Smail. The Debian Smail package can be
>>>used like this.
>> Unless you have bad network connectivity. Smail 3.1.29 bit me
>>BADLY this way; it does not deal well with frequent network
>>problems. Sendmail is, of course, a huge security hole, but it does
>>handle network problems well.
>What is ``bad network connectivity'' defined to mean here?
>
>I'm using Smail from home, bringing the modem up only occasionally;
>everything just works - if I send mail when the modem is down (as
>now), it sits in the queue until I bring the connection up (I put a
>call to runq in /etc/ppp/ip-up.)
I had a setup where diald was being used for a SLIP link. There
would always be a route for network access to the outside world, but the
link would go dead sometimes and require diald to sink packets while it
tried to bring the line back up. This caused DNS requests to fail (server
failure message, not the no entry message) because my name server couldn't
talk to the root nameservers. When Smail received this failure indication,
it bounced the message back to sender instead of trying to retry the lookup
and/or queue for later processing tries. This apparently has something to
do with the new queue/DNS interaction in 3.1.29; 3.1.28 didn't have this
particular problem (but it had others). Smail also doesn't like having the
rug pulled out from under it when it's talking SMTP, though it usually
recovers.
Granted, the root of my problem here was lousy connectivity, but it
managed to get Smail confused. When I installed Sendmail 8.6.12, these mail
problems went away. If only there were a chance that Sendmail could be
made secure, I'd feel better about using it. For something like Debian,
however, Smail is probably the winner because (a) Debian prefers GPL software
(b) Smail works fine for 99.9% of the cases.
-Craig
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