On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 11:38, Robin Bowes wrote: > Les Mikesell said the following on 02/20/2006 05:16 PM: > > Qmail has caused me enough pain in the past that I'd never run it by > > choice again although qpsmtpd solves one of it's problems. > > Care to elaborate on that? What pain have you suffered, and which > problem does qpsmtpd solve?
The biggest problem with stock qmail is that it accepts everything at the smtp level then generates bounces for anything it can't deliver. For the last several years 'dictionary attacks' have been a common spam/virus delivery approach so you end up with a huge queue of bounces to undeliverable sender addresses that clog up your own outbound deliveries. Qpsmtpd fixes this one by checking allowed recipients before accepting a message. The other problem may not be so bad for people where the destinations are randomly distributed, but my servers are in remote offices, mostly with expensive private frame-relay links and the bulk of email use is to groups of people at one or a few other locations. Qmail will always send a separate copy of every message to each recipient even if they are on the same destination host. So, if someone sends a big file to a large group of people (which my users often do), it hogs the bandwidth of that office link long enough for people to complain. This can also be a problem on an internet link if you have a limited uplink rate. Other mailers would group the recipients to the same next-hop destination. And of course there is the personal issue of having to learn yet another complicated way of doing things which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the time you waste on the problems with no solution. -- Les Mikesell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
