Re: why use sendmail?
On Sun, Mar 31, 2002 at 09:50:44AM -0600, Richard Cobbe wrote:
| Lo, on Sunday, March 31, Simon Hepburn did write:
|
| > dman wrote:
| >
| > > The reason is that KMail is not a proper SMTP client. The RFCs (821,
| > > 2821) state that if a message can't be delivered to the next server in
| > > charge, then it must keep the message and retry later. It can't just
| > > say "oh, well" and give up. KMail (along with Lookout and every other
| > > User Agent) doesn't do this.
|
| Haven't read the RFCs in question: does that requirement apply to MUAs,
| or just MTAs?
The RFCs don't talk about MUAs and MTAs. They talk about SMTP clients
and SMTP servers. Any program that initiates an SMTP connection (and
tries to transfer a message) is an SMTP client. It doesn't matter if
it is a "MUA" or an "MTA".
[...]
| Second, if you've got exim running constantly (instead of from
| /etc/inetd.conf),
The package has a cronjob to run "exim -q" every 15 minutes anyways.
| it'll retry in the background without users having to
| take any action. I guess it's my software engineering/development
| training, but I like the idea of placing the queueing functionality in
| one place (the MTA), rather than replicating it out among lots of
| different places (all the various MUAs that people use).
I wholly agree here.
| Still, I guess this is more important on a large multi-user system.
I think it is equally important for my one-user system. I think this
line of thinking is part of what makes the biggest difference between
MS products and UNIX. UNIX is built with "large multi-user" in mind,
whereas Windows evolved from a single-user desktop system. Even for a
home/family computer, multi-user is very important. Just tonight I
was talking with a friend who was asking about the equalizer settings
in winamp. If he loads a preset setting, winamp will retain that the
next time it is run. Of course, if someone else in his family changes
it, it won't be the way he left it. One feature of a multi-user
system is separate settings for separate users.
-D
--
(E)ventually (M)allocs (A)ll (C)omputer (S)torage
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