🚀 go-pugleaf

arnold@stat.ncsu.edu (Tim Arnold) writes:
|I'm worried about a high volume of mail requests--I am running
|a Sun Sparc IPX, SunOS 4.1.3, OW 3, unix listserv, gopher and
|squirrel mail server.  I'm using the standard sendmail that came
|on the machine.

|My question is: what mta should I be using? If sendmail is a problem,
|why is it a problem?

  The usual problems are twofold:
	a) sendfail(8), and
	b) performance

(a) can be achieved by attempting to program in the senamail
production language: rumor has it even the author can't remember
how it really works (:-)).

(b) is related to sendmail's desire to fork instead of queue. It
is trivial to stop a small machine (like a NeXT cube, for example)
by mailing to a large mailing-list.  Sendmail's overload-avoidance
is seriously flawed.

  On the other hand, I can say good things about zmailer:
	a) its very low load: I had a sun 3/60 acting as the mailhub
	   of the second-largets Canadian university, and it only
	   slowed down when someone uucp'd compresses news to it.
	   I couldn't even tell if mail was running from xload, and 
	   faked up a queue-indicator to show me tat it was alive.
	b) it handles large mailing lsists well
	c) it's dead easy to install.  Large, but dead easy.
	d) the routing doesn't se rewriting
	e) the routing code is written in a language designed for
	   unix nerds to program in: it's deliberatly similar to sh.

--dave (a happy customer) c-b
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@CCS.YorkU.CA | lethe!dave
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | 
Willowdale, Ontario,  | York Postmaster and
CANADA. 416-223-8968  | occasional sendfail(8) consultant.