Re: Sendmail vs Exim vs Others

[Steve Lamb <grey@dmiyu.org>]

Jamin W. Collins wrote:
> That just FUD.  It may not be the easiest MTA to work with but the above
> is just misleading and wrong.

    Is it?

    Queue maintenance?  Correct me if I'm wrong but is this FUD.

Removing a message from Exim's queue:
exim -Mrm <message-ID>

Removing a message from qmail's queue:
Issue command to shut down qmail.
Sometimes wait up to 20m for it to completely shut down.
Manually find and delete messages.
Run the queue fix utility (which, if memory serves, is not part of the base 
qmail package by the original author)
Start up qmail

    How about searching the logs for meaningful information on a message?

In exim:
Grep for the address in the logs and look for the basic timeframe of the 
message you want to isolate.
Copy message ID to the clipboard.
Grep for the message ID.

In qmail
Grep for the address in the logs and look for the basic timeframe of the 
message you want to isolate.
Realize that qmail's timestamps are not meant for mortals so pipe it through 
tai64nlocal to get meaningful times.
Grab the message ID.
Grep the logs (remembering to pipe this time) for that message ID to see what 
comes up.
Get a buttload of beginning delivery status messagess....
....for multiple messages since the inode had about 30 messages in it in the 
past couple of hours.
Grab instead the delivery ID of each attempt and grep manually (remembering to 
pipe this time).

    In the Exim case if a message had 6 attempted deliveries with 5 deferrals 
I'd get all of that with the grep on the message ID.  I'd know the history of 
that message.  In the QMail case I can't because each delivery is unique and 
has no tie to the message in any form.  The delivery messages don't have 
either the address in it or the message ID in it.

    In the several years of using Exim I have done far more perusing of logs 
and have never seriously gotten outside of grep and less.  In the 3 months of 
using QMail I've given up and written a tool just to do basic searches for 
email addresses and the associated deliveries.  By the same token I find 
simple queue maintenance of Exim a breeze while qmail is a chore which, again, 
requires external tools which had to be written by other people just to get 
simple operations done.  Tell me how any of that is FUD and not fact.

--
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
       PGP Key: 8B6E99C5       | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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