Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!liuida!isy!herkules.sssab.se!sveer From: sveer@sssab.se (Sven L Eriksson) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Easy administered mailers (transfer agent) Message-ID: Date: 28 Nov 90 12:09:52 GMT Organization: Scandinavian System Support AB Lines: 70 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 will send mail to user@node.dom.ain via UUCP. The 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 And if you want the mailer to check with the UUCP system for known UUCP hosts: /`uuname`/.UUCP : | uux - $1!rmail $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