[Mailman-Users] MTAs

[John W. Baxter]

On 3/25/2005 16:37, "Brad Knowles" <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> wrote:

> In this situation, *BSD with softupdates will be your best bet on
> the filesystem side.  The cool thing about softupdates is that it
> re-orders the disk I/O operations in a safe manner, and if the file
> is created and goes away quickly enough, then the I/O is never pushed
> to disk at all.
> 
> All the *BSD implementations should be capable of enabling softupdates.

That's all very well, but the reason that all those little files are created
and destroyed is that it isn't safe to hold the data in RAM, and once an MTA
has accepted a message, a mere power outage isn't supposed to cause it to
drop the message on the floor.  (There are even words in the mail RFCs about
it.)

Unless softupdates "sees" power outages and hustles the data onto disk
(which is probably feasible) it would not be considered MTA-suitable (and
Exim does what it can to prevent it, using whatever force to disk calls are
available to it).

  --John