🚀 go-pugleaf

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