Re: Just a question
On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 02:15:40PM +0100, Richard Curnow wrote:
> * Charles Cazabon <mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2004-03-31]:
> >
> > No, especially considering you're using your ISP's smarthost. The only
> > thing
> > a "real" MTA would buy you would be if you wanted to send email to another
> > user on your system (i.e. host local mail yourself).
>
> What about queueing mails on your local system to upload to the ISP's
> smarthost when you go online? I tend to write a lot of emails offline
> and queue them. Having a local MTA is useful for this too.
nullmailer appears to be able to handle off-line queuing. I haven't
tried it because I have broadband. This from man nullmailer-send:
DESCRIPTION
This program is responsible for coordinating the transmis
sion of messages that have been queued by nullmailer-
queue. It uses a variety of protocol modules to deliver
the messages from the queue to remote "smart" servers.
When the program starts, the queue is scanned to build a
list of messages to send. The queue is rescanned when
either the trigger is pulled, or after pausetime seconds
have elapsed after the last failed delivery. When there
are no messages in the queue, nullmailer does no rescan
ning until the trigger is pulled. Pulling the trigger
consists of opening up the trigger named pipe and writing
a single byte to it, which causes this program to be awak
ened (if it's not already processing the queue). This
procedure is done by nullmailer-queue to ensure that mes
sages are delivered immediately.
Delivery of messages consists of reading the list of
remote servers and then trying to deliver the messages to
these servers as follows. For each remote in the list,
the named protocol handler is executed once for each mes
sage remaining in the queue. If the protocol handler suc
ceeds, the message is removed from the queue and process
ing continues with the next message. If it fails, the
remote is skipped and processing of the remaing messages
continues with the next remote. When all the remotes have
been tried, nullmailer-send sleeps for a number of seconds
specified by pausetime before retrying sending the con
tents of the queue.
My motivation for using nullmailer is two-fold:
1) it's so easy that I can manage it; on Debian stable it just worked
2) my paranoid side tells me to avoid complexity whenever possible,
so if nullmailer provides only what I need, then I am safer
then if I used a full-featured MTA
--
Mike
Moving forward in pushing back the envelope of the corporate paradigm.