Hello,
I'd like to have an MTA who's only purpose is to accept SMTP connections for Mailman mailing lists and spawn the appropriate Mailman binary. This MTA will be fed emails from our Sun Internet Mail Server (IMS) 5.2 cluster.
We are moving away from having IMS 5.2 pipe to a wrapper, which intern spawns the proper Mailman binary, because of an issue with patching breaking the IMS pipe channel (omitting the longer story behind this). The thought now is that IMS will deliver mail destined for a mailing list to another "mailhost" which is running this MTA which will spawn to Mailman. The "Mailman MTA" is just another Ip on the same nodes - although it is introducing an extra hop in delivery to mailing lists, it factors out the Sun / IMS issue we find outself stuck in...
Is anyone using a light weight MTA to just hand emails off to Mailman and deny anything else?
I'm looking at Sun Sendmail (I know, it's definitely not light weight) to do this, simply because it's already on the boxes in question - I'm still sorting out how to get Sendmail to deliver to aliases, but not local accounts.
Thanks for any feedback on MTAs, or a more sensable way to accomplish this.
- Ivan Fetch.
At 10:58 AM -0600 7/27/06, Ivan Fetch wrote:
Is anyone using a light weight MTA to just hand emails off to Mailman and deny anything else?
I was using exim for this purpose and now am using postfix. I can recommend either, but postfix is superior in every way.
I'm looking at Sun Sendmail (I know, it's definitely not light weight) to do this, simply because it's already on the boxes in question - I'm still sorting out how to get Sendmail to deliver to aliases, but not local accounts.
Sendmail is definitely the most difficult MTA to configure and maintain. You can get postfix downloaded, installed, and running in a fraction of the time that it will take to get sendmail to do most of what you want to do.
-- Heather Madrone <heather@madrone.com> The Home-Ed List: http://www.madrone.com/Home-ed/helist.html
You can lead a child to learning, but you can't make her think.
On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 11:02:40AM -0700, Heather Madrone wrote:
At 10:58 AM -0600 7/27/06, Ivan Fetch wrote:
Is anyone using a light weight MTA to just hand emails off to Mailman and deny anything else?
I was using exim for this purpose and now am using postfix. I can recommend either, but postfix is superior in every way.
I would concur.
I'm looking at Sun Sendmail (I know, it's definitely not light weight) to do this, simply because it's already on the boxes in question - I'm still sorting out how to get Sendmail to deliver to aliases, but not local accounts.
Sendmail is definitely the most difficult MTA to configure and maintain. You can get postfix downloaded, installed, and running in a fraction of the time that it will take to get sendmail to do most of what you want to do.
Postfix can be set up, resources are quite low, and once delivery starts will send out your messages without hassle, slow down or a lot of maintenance.
best of luck.
-- Mike Horwath, reachable via drechsau@Geeks.ORG
At 10:58 AM -0600 2006-07-27, Ivan Fetch wrote:
Is anyone using a light weight MTA to just hand emails off to Mailmanand deny anything else?
The issues here are that you need to have certain features in your MTA in order to get that to work well with Mailman, such as a mechanism for adding aliases or some other method of identifying to the MTA which mailing lists are in existence and how to deliver mail to the appropriate addresses for each, etc....
In essence, this means that you can use a lighter-weight MTA than a more standard MTA sendmail, postfix, or Exim, but if you go that direction then you're going to be on your own. Alternatively, you could use sendmail, postfix, or Exim, and just not use those other features of the program that you don't need.
I'm looking at Sun Sendmail (I know, it's definitely not light weight)to do this, simply because it's already on the boxes in question - I'm still sorting out how to get Sendmail to deliver to aliases, but not local accounts.
Sendmail, postfix, and Exim are the three MTAs that integrate most naturally with Mailman. On python.org (where the mailman-users mailing list is hosted, among many others), we currently use postfix. So, we can pretty much guarantee that the integration there is going to work well.
I've been involved in the postfix community for many years (since the days it was called VMailer), and I can tell you that Wietse has done a lot of things that make postfix a good MTA to use out-of-the-box for mailing lists.
I can also say that postfix is one of the very few programs I know of that can have a truly useful configuration file that is just two or three lines long, with everything else being taken from built-in defaults.
Many people in the community also use sendmail, and the integration there is also pretty good -- that is, assuming you're running a pretty standard source-based install, because most vendors do some pretty heavy (and weird) customization of sendmail to work "better" in their environment.
Now, it turns out that John Beck is a longtime member of the Sendmail Consortium (the group that supports the open source version), and has been "the sendmail guy" at Sun for many years, and he's been working to get all those bizarre Sun-isms eliminated from the version they've been shipping. Still, there are some oddities that have remained.
Your choices there are to either install the source-based version of sendmail and get that configured to work in your environment, or figure out what needs to be done to the Sun version in order to get it to work well with Mailman.
From an objective viewpoint, it takes more work to get sendmail configured to work well for mailing lists than it does to get postfix configured to serve that same environment, but if you're more familiar with sendmail then it may be less work to stick with that than to try to rip that out and replace it with a completely different package. It will also take more work to maintain sendmail suitably in this kind of environment as compared to postfix, but if you're doing lots of mail filtering (e.g., anti-spam or anti-virus processing), then you reach a point where sendmail will scale and perform better than postfix on the same hardware.
I can't speak too much for Exim, although I know a number of people in the Exim community make use of Mailman, and they've made it pretty easy to set things up so that you never need to update the aliases or anything in order to get the two working together. I can tell you that Exim is pretty different from either sendmail or postfix, and if you've been used to using one of those two packages then it may take you some time to warp your mind around the Exim way of doing things.
That said, I know that Exim is an excellent MTA if properly configured, and is perfectly suitable for use with Mailman.
Thanks for any feedback on MTAs, or a more sensable way to accomplish this.
Not knowing anything more about your environment, I'd guess that it should be pretty easy to get postfix installed and configured for your system, and we know that it integrates well with Mailman.
IIRC, pretty much all these issues are covered in the archives, and they should also be covered in the FAQ.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.
Hello,
Thank you Heather Madrone, Mike Horwath, and Brad Knowles for your replies.
I'm running Postfix other places with mailman and it is indeed very nice. Since this MTA instance is just for handing off to Mailman, we're not doing any spam filtering or munging of emails.
I have sendmail working here with Mailman (as a test), but I'm having difficulty getting it to ignore local accounts; I'd like it to handle aliases (which it is) but not deliver email to local users on the box. With Postfix I could just set local_recipient_maps, but I haven't found simelar functionality in Sendmail's m4 files yet. ;) Any Sendmial experts out there who know this right off the top of their head?
I certainly could install Postfix in global storage (so all cluster nodes can use it) and go that route too.
Thanks,
Ivan Fetch.
On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Brad Knowles wrote:
At 10:58 AM -0600 2006-07-27, Ivan Fetch wrote:
Is anyone using a light weight MTA to just hand emails off to Mailmanand deny anything else?
The issues here are that you need to have certain features in your MTA in order to get that to work well with Mailman, such as a mechanism for adding aliases or some other method of identifying to the MTA which mailing lists are in existence and how to deliver mail to the appropriate addresses for each, etc....
In essence, this means that you can use a lighter-weight MTA than a more standard MTA sendmail, postfix, or Exim, but if you go that direction then you're going to be on your own. Alternatively, you could use sendmail, postfix, or Exim, and just not use those other features of the program that you don't need.
I'm looking at Sun Sendmail (I know, it's definitely not light weight)to do this, simply because it's already on the boxes in question - I'm still sorting out how to get Sendmail to deliver to aliases, but not local accounts.
Sendmail, postfix, and Exim are the three MTAs that integrate most naturally with Mailman. On python.org (where the mailman-users mailing list is hosted, among many others), we currently use postfix. So, we can pretty much guarantee that the integration there is going to work well.
I've been involved in the postfix community for many years (since the days it was called VMailer), and I can tell you that Wietse has done a lot of things that make postfix a good MTA to use out-of-the-box for mailing lists.
I can also say that postfix is one of the very few programs I know of that can have a truly useful configuration file that is just two or three lines long, with everything else being taken from built-in defaults.
Many people in the community also use sendmail, and the integration there is also pretty good -- that is, assuming you're running a pretty standard source-based install, because most vendors do some pretty heavy (and weird) customization of sendmail to work "better" in their environment.
Now, it turns out that John Beck is a longtime member of the Sendmail Consortium (the group that supports the open source version), and has been "the sendmail guy" at Sun for many years, and he's been working to get all those bizarre Sun-isms eliminated from the version they've been shipping. Still, there are some oddities that have remained.
Your choices there are to either install the source-based version of sendmail and get that configured to work in your environment, or figure out what needs to be done to the Sun version in order to get it to work well with Mailman.
From an objective viewpoint, it takes more work to get sendmail configured to work well for mailing lists than it does to get postfix configured to serve that same environment, but if you're more familiar with sendmail then it may be less work to stick with that than to try to rip that out and replace it with a completely different package. It will also take more work to maintain sendmail suitably in this kind of environment as compared to postfix, but if you're doing lots of mail filtering (e.g., anti-spam or anti-virus processing), then you reach a point where sendmail will scale and perform better than postfix on the same hardware.
I can't speak too much for Exim, although I know a number of people in the Exim community make use of Mailman, and they've made it pretty easy to set things up so that you never need to update the aliases or anything in order to get the two working together. I can tell you that Exim is pretty different from either sendmail or postfix, and if you've been used to using one of those two packages then it may take you some time to warp your mind around the Exim way of doing things.
That said, I know that Exim is an excellent MTA if properly configured, and is perfectly suitable for use with Mailman.
Thanks for any feedback on MTAs, or a more sensable way to accomplish this.
Not knowing anything more about your environment, I'd guess that it should be pretty easy to get postfix installed and configured for your system, and we know that it integrates well with Mailman.
IIRC, pretty much all these issues are covered in the archives, and they should also be covered in the FAQ.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.
participants (4)
-
Brad Knowles -
Heather Madrone -
Ivan Fetch -
Mike Horwath