🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3473@aw.sei.cmu.edu> pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Pat Barron) writes:
>Under
>BSD Unix, lots of people have rules in their sendmail.cf file to send all
>".BITNET" mail to wiscvm.wisc.edu.  Well, in 10 days, all those mailers
>are going to break, because wiscvm isn't going to be the gateway anymore.
>The same thing happened with ".UUCP" mail, which a lot of people hardwired
>to go to seismo.

Yeah, but the the bitnet forward is just a one line change in
sendmail.cf.  The uucp shouldn't be much more.  Or, you could alias
seismo to be something else for uucp.  These things strike me as an
aspect of site administration, and if the warnings for the bitnet
cutovers, or the shift from seismo -> uunet didn't give people an
opportunity to make the change, that's not the notifiers' problems.
Both cases provided quite a bit of lead time.

This message brings to mind something else.  Once in while, one sees a
message in this group (or a related one) that goes "i am writing this
new mailer, and it will fix these problems i have with sendmail and do
these sendmail things as trivial cases of this general principle."
Now, mailer writing is not a bad thing, and this is an area to learn by
doing and all that, but it sure seems to me that much of this is more
the result of someone knowing a programming language better than they
know the sendmail.cf syntax or sendmail itself.

I realize that not everybody likes sendmail, and there are some
attractive and very workable alternatives, like mmdf, but i'll bet that
people who don't understand their mailer are bound to repeat it.

Then again, I could have missed the point.  Let me (oof) step down off
of this soapbox and get on to the next article.

--paul
-- 
Trying everything that whiskey cures in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Over one billion messages read.