Re: Random neuron firing #242

[Marco Hernandez <marco@yukon.cren.org>]

> At 7:24 PM 6/28/94, Mark Moraes wrote:
> >At the moment, Zmailer's a bit of an orphan, which is sad.  I think that
> >Zmailer is the best mailer available for large mail gateways or sites
> >that need high flexibility, but it needs an official maintainer to at
> >least put fixes/new-ports into the main version -- nope, I'm not
> >volunteering!
> 
> I agree on all points. Until Sendmail gets a better queuing system (and as
> an interesting aside, Eric Allman has admitted that the current one, even
> in Sendmail 8, is less than optimal, and that he hopes to do something
> about it at some point), ZMailer wins hands-down for mail routing and
> list-server processing (in fact, CREN is now recommending ZMailer for use
> with their upcoming release of ListProc 7.0), which is precisely what we
> use it for here.
> 

That is correct, we have tried both sendmail 8 and zmailer here and
for large mail gateway/list processing zmailer wins ...  The problem I
have is that the documentation is poor and outdates ..  and probably
for most folks on the net, Zmailer is too complex to configure and
debug ..  


We are running Matti's latest here but there are a couple of things
about that which make it not ready for prime time.

	It is written with gcc dependencies so that it will not compile
	using either the stock SUN cc or the unbudled SUN compiler
	without delving into the code (It actually wants gcc 2.5.6 or
	greater ....)  I think that will be a bit of a hinderence in
	getting it more widely used .. :-(  There are sites that are
	not going to install gcc (or more probable do not know how to
	install gcc (yes beleive it ....) 

	Matti's code still generates a few core dumps ...  (his router
	actually ..)  but that will be fixed I'm sure .....

	On the plus side, it does handle some of the ESMTP options 
	The 8-bit MIME has worked for us in combination with listproc
	for international character sets ....

 
> Sendmail, on the other hand, wins on end-user systems (as long as someone
> clueful configures it :-), and wins for support (although, now that Matti
> has taken over de facto support duties, that's improving). Our mail router
> uses ZMailer; our postoffices (POP servers) use Sendmail 8.
> 

	For end user systems, sendmail also gives faster throughput.  The
time between submission and delivery is less noticible which is great
for systems that end users use  (They want to hit the send key and 
instantly return to the command prompt of their MUA ...

> I also agree that ZM needs an official home, and I'm not volunteering,
> either, but only because I haven't asked my boss yet :-) It would certainly
> be a challenge...
> 

Agreed, I would love to but I barely have time enough for 6 hours
sleep :-)  So that is not possible at the moment ...

> Of course, if Matti wants to declare himself official by virtue of being
> the one who has taken on the effort of modernizing the program, I don't
> think I would argue the point :-)


Here Here !!!


> 
> ZMailer is a wonderful program; but one way or another, it's going to need
> support if it's going to have a future.
> 

I think  the Michael mentioned that he had made some changes to Ryans
code .. (the toronto release ...) I'd be interested in talking to him
about that off line .... 

Cheers,

Marco