Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!mucs!cns!jf From: jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest) Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh Subject: Re: Problems with whatnow/send Message-ID: <1991Jan27.180017.4955@cns.umist.ac.uk> Date: 27 Jan 91 18:00:17 GMT References: <5740009@hpscdc.scd.hp.com> Sender: usenet@cns.umist.ac.uk (News System) Organization: comp Lines: 36 In article <5740009@hpscdc.scd.hp.com> schmitz@hpscdc.scd.hp.com (John Schmitz) writes: > >Perhaps I'm showing my ignorance here, but... > > Q. What exactly are the benefits of using SMTP with mh? > > A. Well, the primary one I know of is that you don't have to run a > Mail Transport Agent on every host. When you have several hundred > client workstations, it's a major hassle to manage a Sendmail (or > MMDF, etc.) on every one of them. > >It seems to me that unix really relies on being able to use mail. All >sorts of programs have built in calls to mail (vi, cron, etc.) and it >would be difficult to administer systems without having an MTA. >Further, other mailers aren't capable of this feature, so if you want >them to work, you must have a MTA. Or did I miss something? I think the argument about managing sendmail on many workstations is a bit of a red herring. As pointed out, many programs do like to invoke sendmail, and you need to set it up so that they can. However, there is an argument relating to efficiency. We've recently changed so that mh uses smtp rather than invoking sendmail directly, and thus sendmail doesn't have to start up from scratch each time. One of the reasons for this is that we prefer not to have frozen configurations - in a group of workstations there *are* hard to manage, as they must be set up individually on each workstations if the .cf file changes. They also use a lot more disk-space. I think this is the major advantage. Apart from that, you *can* run MH on things without sendmail, but this is not really a normal thing. For instance, the mail from rn still has to invoke sendmail directly as far as I know. John Forrest Dept of Computation UMIST