[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Brad Knowles]

At 11:53 PM -0500 2003/10/29, Barry Warsaw wrote:

>  Chuq, do you think it would be feasible for Mailman to try to handle
>  that 90% itself, and then only hand-off to a Real MTA when it runs into
>  trouble with the other 10% -- assuming it could know when it runs into
>  trouble.

	Bryan Costales and Eric Allman had this debate at 
InfoBeat/Mercury Mail.  Bryan said that he could write a better 
"simple" MTA that could handle the easy 80% and leave the hard 20% to 
sendmail.  Eric showed that he could improve sendmail to the point 
where it would perform at or near the level of performance of Bryan's 
code without throwing everything out, and would out-perform every 
other aspect of the system in question (so that the MTA was no longer 
the bottleneck at any stage).

	I'm confident that the same sort of approach is appropriate for 
other well-respected MTAs (e.g., postfix, and exim in my personal 
experience).

>  Also, there's incoming SMTP and outgoing SMTP.  It may be possible to
>  build in support for one direction without providing the other.  (It
>  also may not be worth it.)

	It's hard enough writing an incoming SMTP handler, and doing it 
right.  Many large service providers have seriously screwed up when 
trying to do so (bigfoot anyone?), and others have only implemented 
half of the inbound solution (AOL), leaving the harder parts to 
standard programs like sendmail.

	Even then I argued violently against this approach at AOL, and 
felt that we could do a better job by leaving all the external 
interfacing/queueing issues to sendmail, and instead make the 
in-house developed code an LMTP Local Delivery Agent.  I was 
over-ruled, primarily because we had already gone too far down the 
road that had been chosen for us.  Note that none of the original 
Internet Mail Operations team members are left at AOL (almost all 
bugged out when the new mail server software came online), and I 
don't think any of the original Internet Mail Development team 
members are left, either.

	Bad Juju, Bwana.


	I've been down this road before.  Trust me, you don't want to do this.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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