🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun27.022340.15573@cbnewsk.att.com> hansen@pegasus.att.com (Tony L. Hansen) writes:
>< I will soon be upgrading a group of SysVr3 machines to SysVr4. Should I
>< consider using the native mailer instead of replacing it with Smail3
>< which I am using now?  I need good alias, forwarding and list file
>< handling.  It looks like the SysVr4 mailer will do some of this, but
>< can it match Smail at recursing through the aliases, forwards and lists
>< until everything is resolved and the duplicates discarded?

>I believe that the SVr4 mail system can do everything that smail can do.

Smail3 is very different from smail2.5.  It includes things like basing
the transport method on way that the address was identified, grouping
messages within specified bounds for a single execution of the transport,
etc.  A quick test shows the the SysVr4 mailer does weed out duplicates
when doing alias expansion, but it isn't happy with aliases that
expand user to localmachine!user which is no problem for smail3.  It
might be possible to fix this, but the grouping seems to be more of
a problem.  I can't see any way to control the delivery such that a
100 user mailing list is delivered with the fewest possible executions
of uux.  Likewise, most of my users are on a LAN using PMX-Starmail and
I want to notify them when mail comes in.  The pmxstarnotify program
is pretty slow and consumes a lot of resources.  It used to totally
destroy the machine when a list was delivered using the mailsurr
file that ran pmxstarnotify in the background for each recipient.
Also, I don't see any way to continue processing after noting that the
local-address is not a user name.  With smail3 you can make a list
handler expand a list after checking for valid user names so it is
fairly safe to allow anyone to create a mailing list (i.e. they can't
divert a real user's mail).

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.il.us