I've been running mailman with vmailer for a number of relatively small lists for a while now. In general, everything works fine between the two.

However, On installation, I also had to wrestle with the parent UID and GID checks on the mail-wrapper since vmailer sets those values to various things depending on where the sender originates and, more recently, on the ownership of the aliases file.

vmailer has decided to deal with mailling lists wrappers by handling the problem itself: the delivery process sets the UID and GID of the process to the owner of the aliases file when it delivers to programs or users in that file.

This way, there should be no need for wrapper programs to run checks on processes started by mail.

One way this can be approached is to set the parent UID and GID in the mail wrapper to the UID and GID of the owner of the relevant aliases file. Another way would be to eliminate the wrapper altogether for these processes using vmailer.

For those of you unfamiliar with vmailer, it's an MTA by Wietse Venema that's under the late stages of alpha testing. It should go into public beta testing very soon (within a week?), and it's likely that it will be widely accepted as a sendmail replacement, judging from Wietse's past projects and talk in the newsgroups.

I just thought it'd be a good idea to report about this combo should anyone else be curious, and see what people thought about trying to make mailman work out of the box a little more easily with vmailer. Is it worth checking for in configure to decide whether or not the mail-wrapper is necessary?

scott