[NTLUG:Discuss] mailserver

[Christopher Browne]

On Sat, 09 Sep 2000 08:42:56 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
"B. DEGRASSE" <bdegrasse at home.com>  said:
> This has been an interesting thread on mail.  My question is where and what
> servers provide mail-list services, such as major-domo etc.  Can someone lay
> that out for me.

By and large, this isn't something that "mail servers" provide, _at all_.

Mail list managers like MailMan and MajorDomo and such tend to be separate
programs from the MTA (Mail Transfer Agent, e.g. - Sendmail, Postfix,
qmail, ...)

And it is a _well and good thing_ that there is this separation.  After
all, once a set of messages gets forwarded to _your_ MTA, they're just
going to get relayed to other MTAs.  There is little to no benefit in
making a mailing list manager MTA-specific, as the mail is almost
immediately going to get forwarded to an MTA that may be quite different
in architecture from the one you are running.

The critical component in the whole process is indeed the MTA; it 
tends to be the "scariest" thing to configure, particularly if you
plan to use Sendmail and do anything vastly different from running a
default configuration.

In the case of Sendmail, part of the "scariness" comes in the fact
that some of the configuration format is _REALLY FRIGHTENING_.
Postfix and qmail both avoid that, but interesting configurations are
nonetheless not trivial to cope with which seems to me to demonstrate
that _understanding_ MTA configuration isn't quite an easy thing.

If there were GUI front ends, that might give the _impression_ that
they would be "easy to configure," but that strikes me as representing
the fallacy that "because there is a GUI, it must be user friendly."
That seems to indeed be the case with "Sendmail for Windows;" it
uses the same configuration scheme as "plain old Sendmail," but
people get the _impression_ that it is friendlier just because
there is a GUI.
--
cbbrowne at acm.org - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
There are few personal problems which can't be solved by the suitable
application of high explosives.