Re: Qmail or Zmailer

[Alvin Starr <alvin@iplink.net>]

On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, John DiMarco wrote:

> In message <19990204023650.5BEF355373@dana.oz.net>you write:
> >Zmailer, if I'm not mistaken, has been developed paying special attention to t
> >he need to move huge amounts of mail on some systems.
> 
> While workload issues have always been important to zmailer, the primary
> design criterion was the need to support, in a flexible way, a great number
> of different and sometimes bizarre mechanisms for sending and receiving email.
> These days, people are almost always interested in SMTP alone, but when
> zmailer was designed, many other weird and wonderful ways of moving email
> from point A to point B were alive and well, and thus zmailer has the
> innate ability to be extended in correspondingly weird and wonderful ways.

I had the pleasure(not) of working on a E-mail converter several months
ago. The project seemed to be patterned on the design of zmailer. Although
the unix community have setled on SMTP there are still a number of wirid
and wonderfull systems out there. CCMail, LotusNotes,FirstClass,
Exchange... Having an Exchange delevery agent would be a usefull tool with
zmailers robustness it would beat the hell out of the half-baked tools
that exist to convert SMTP to propritary systems.

> >If you have a question, or find something that you think is wrong with qmail, 
> >you'll probably send the author, Dan something or other, off the deep end, ran
> >ting all the way.
> 
> Dan Bernstein can be, um, "difficult".  I would describe him as a man with a
> remarkably strong opinion of his own correctness. If a mailer similar in
> philosophy to qmail is desired, but without Bernstein attached, Venema's
> postfix is now available.

Sounds like a fellow I worked with a number of years ago. He insisted that
peer reviews were a waste of time since he had no peers ;)

Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (416)585-9971
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