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From: wisner@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Bill Wisner)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: smail 3.x
Message-ID: <7095@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 89 11:02:32 GMT
References: <392@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> <6616@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> <430@zinn.MV.COM>
Reply-To: wisner@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Bill Wisner)
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
Lines: 31

>Would it be possible to get a synopsis of important new features, in order
>to entertain a suggestion-and-denial period?  There's a bunch of things I've
>been hoping for...

Smail 3.1 was written from scratch. The only thing it has in common with
earlier versions of Smail is the name.

On machines with Berkeley networking, Smail 3.1 has an SMTP listener and
handles outgoing SMTP mail. It gets along fine with BIND 4.8 and obeys
MX records.

For UUCP sites, it supports a variant called uusmtp. Some trivial hacks
described in the documentation will implement true batched SMTP over UUCP
links, with many messages being transferred in one file.

It knows about all the Sendmail alias file constructs, including mail
piped into a program and sent to an arbitrary file name. And no, no
DEBUG command in SMTP mode.

It can access a paths file stored with DBM.

It includes a very fun little program called mkpath that will transmogrify
UUCP maps into a paths file based on the directions given in a configuration
file.

There is no way I could possibly extoll all the virtues of Smail from memory,
particularly at this hour. Why not post your suggestions and denials? I'm
sure the Smail 3.1 authors are lurking here somewhere; you might give them
some ideas.

Bill, the man from Xanth