Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!mtunx!rutgers!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: BSMTP - Its time has come Message-ID: <9593@g.ms.uky.edu> Date: 8 Jun 88 05:40:19 GMT References: <14605@uunet.UU.NET> <10127@mcdchg.UUCP> <10266@ncc.Nexus.CA> <1787@van-bc.UUCP> <10267@ncc.Nexus.CA> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 83 In article <10267@ncc.Nexus.CA> lyndon@ncc.nexus.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes: >In article <1787@van-bc.UUCP> sl@wimsey.bc.ca (10 Stuart Lynne) writes: >>Something else which could (should) be done is to get BSMTP implemented at >>UUNET. >I have the bsmtp code sitting here. If Rick's willing to install >it then so am I. Do I hear Stuart volunteering to teach smail >how to grok the bsmtp mailer? Well now, there's finally some interest in doing this :-), a year after I posted that code you've got sitting there. Anyway, let me toss out a few thoughts which'll have to be overcome. Getting my bsmtp program to interface to smail would be trivial, merely follow the outline I wrote into domail() (or whatever that routine was named) to call /bin/smail with the right arguments. Easy stuff ... Now, a couple of problems. Queueing. To take advantage of the batching in bsmtp you want to have as many mail messages in the batch as you can manage. But neither smail or sendmail will handle more than one message at a time, will they? (My memory on them is a little poor, but I don't remember anything for handling more than one message at any one moment). Under MMDF I would write a channel program derived from the SMTP channel. It'd look through the queue, pick up all the messages headed for a particular host, bundle them up and send them out. I'd also schedule the daemon to run (say) once an hour to increase the chances of having >1 message in a bundle. Under sendmail or smail how would one have a good chance of having more than one message per bundle? If you end up having only one message per bundle then there's no decrease in the number of files sent, and even a loss because of more data being sent -- the BSMTP wrapper. Routing. Yes, you can say that uunet does BSMTP (assuming that you get Rick to implement it). Now, what do you do after that? You'll have other sites with BSMTP capabilities also. Other places might want to send BSMTP to remote sites. How do you tell the world that you can do BSMTP and what domains you're willing to handle gatewaying? I'm not saying this very well so I hope I'm getting through anyway. I'm curious about something. There's no error recovery in the BSMTP program. Has anybody had any problems because of this? Should there be error recovery? Interesting coincidence. Just today I started work on an "obsmtp" counterpart which'll include a restructuring of the source for "ibsmtp". (Basically to spin off most of ibsmtp into a utils file which'll also be used in obsmtp). What should the arguments for obsmtp be? At the moment I'm using: obsmtp [ -f from ] [ -h local-host ] [ -t to ] ... [ -c cmd ] But don't really see how to make that do multiple things properly. My immediate application can't use multiple things in one batch because I don't badly need it for sending mail across BITNET. Besides, I'm not sure if the Crosswell mailer will decode a bsmtp file that has multiple messages -- it ought to. Anyway, another option would be something like: ( echo HELO local-host for f in ${files}; do obsmtp -f from -t to-list done echo QUIT ) | command Which could work out of the same program I described above -- assuming proper actions when options aren't specified. Thoughts? -- <---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <---- s.k.a.: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- But if you saw me on the road, would you know who I am? <---- That's why I wear a hat.