Re: UUCP & Exim problems

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Author: John Goerzen
Date:  
To: Philip Hazel
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: UUCP & Exim problems
> On Fri, 10 Jan 1997, John Goerzen wrote:
>
> > I have successfully got Exim to work with sending uucp with a pipe transport.
> > However, when there is a single message with multiple recipients, it runs the
> > uux program once for each recipient -- thus forcing uucp to send the same
> > message multiple times. This is very bad for mailing lists.
>
> If you are using batch SMTP, check out the bsmtp option of the pipe
> transport and section 42.10 of the manual, which goes into detail about
> batching of multiple addresses.


Helo Philip,

Unfortunately, SMTP format is not compatible with UUCP. (I would, of course,
allow exim to receive SMTP messages from local mail programs that use SMTP,
such as Netscape. But UUCP is used for the actual connection to Internet.)

> If you aren't using batch SMTP, please send some details of how you are
> doing this, as I've never run UUCP and so am totally unfamiliar with how
> you might be driving it.


OK. I'll skip some irrelevant command-line parameters here and explain the
basics.

What happens when sending a message with UUCP is this. The program uux needs
to be called and the message piped to it, like thus:

uux host!rmail address1 address2 address3 ... addressn

Where all addresses that a particular e-mail should be delivered to appear on
the command line. If the command line is larger than, I think, 1024 bytes,
then uux should be invoked multiple times until all the addresses have been
specified. (This is similar to what the xargs program does)

This is the end of Exim's responsibility. The UUCP software takes care of
delivering the mail to the remote site ("host" in the above example) and the
remote site will take care of sending the mail.

Now I have been able to use the pipe transport to set up something like this:

uux host!rmail address1
uux host!rmail address2
uux host!rmail address3
...
uux host!rmail addressn

Which causes a copy of the message to be sent out for each recipient! As I
run some mailing lists from this site, it is not acceptable for UUCP to be
sending out a copy of a message for each recipient.

Also, when mail is received, there is nothing special that Exim must do, as
the rmail program is in charge of processing received mail, and rmail
generally passes the mail to Exim just as any other mail agent (but setting
the From line, so rmail runs as a "trusted" user)

So really all I need to know how to do is specify each (non-local) recipient
on the command line, instead of invoking the program again for each recipient.

Thanks,
John Goerzen

-- 
John Goerzen          | Running Debian GNU/Linux (www.debian.org)
Custom Programming    | 
jgoerzen@??? |