Thanks for the reply, Bill.
> D) In the case of Ecartis, do a 'full court press' smtp session to *wherever*
> (domain.tld / IP and port) they are pointed. i.e. do not even *have* to do their
> outbound thru the MTA on the same server where they reside (though inbound would
> be .. usually).
That sounds promising on some levels and is definitely worthy or consideration.
But I don't think it will really suit. The lists of recipients are just too
dynamic. Almost every mail that would go to a list would go to a different list,
and others are personalised in ways that rewriting/regex rules couldn't handle.
The manager would have to be reconfigured constantly and by script. Simpler just
to be able to inject mail into some system that will deliver it. I agree a
full-blown MTA quite probably isn't necessary, but I think it may be the most
robust. There are a lot of simpler things out there, but I've often found the
simpler things just do dumb things or fail nastily or such. Decent MTAs don't have
this problem.
> Sure - but a full-blown MTA is gross overkill - and - more importantly, Exim is
> NOT ordinarily in the business of altering message format - especially not
> body content - which sounds like something your scripts could use a bit of aid with.
No, just delivery is cool. I can get the scripts to do all the content alterations
that are necessary (or not).
> Worth it if there are hundreds of such needs, ELSE a simple smtp binary for
> raw/properly formatted traffic, or the MLM if manipulation would help.
What simple smtp binaries are out there? This sounds more like what I am actually
after. Just something that will deliver a message when one is pumped into it, and
safely (i.e. with proper locks so it doesn't clobber anything) generate a nice
failure notice somewhere local when it can't finish the delivery, preferably
keeping a copy of the message for easy retry. Thing is, though, I'd want one
that's fairly solid. I mean, I could easily hack one together myself in a few
hours, but am not wanting to pursue that option, as although it would work most of
the time, without thorough testing it would have potential for nasty failures,
security holes, and trouble with corner cases. I can easily imagine that these
kinds of things and other 'embeddable' critters you mention could easily become
nightmares. The infamous formmail falls in that category, I guess. So I guess if I
were to use some simple smtp binary, I'd want it to be a solid one with a good
reputation. And I just haven't heard of one like that.
It'll be PHP I'm using mostly or exclusively.
> There are tons of 'embeddable' or callable smtp critters in perl, python, ruby,
> tcl, forth, etc.
>
> As these are also sometimes an admin's worst nightmare, an MLM may be easier /
> more welcome for admins and yourself to work with as it leaves proper
> 'footprints' - nice debug and activity logs and such.
That's a good point, too.
> My tool of choice - if you haven't guessed - it a one-user Ecartis. OTOH, I use
> it a lot for real lists the past many years as well, so the configs are easy.
> Mailman is another failry configurable one - just not my area of expertise.
I've had quite a bit of experience with Mailman which I run locally at the moment,
doing some of the task which I want to get happening on this server, in a very
makeshift way. Thinking about it a bit more now, I think my experience with that
tells me that an MLM is not the way to go.
> BUT - parting shot - their Exim configure can *very* easily be made...
Mmm. I just think they don't want anything 'non-default' in there! Seems a bit
crazy, but there you have it. Maybe there is some history there with an upgrade
breaking some configs or something, I don't know. I think they'd just be happier
for me to quietly set up something independent without affecting anyone else than
hassle them about changing things. Actually, I can kinda see where they're coming
from--if you can provide something really solid that suits the majority, and not
change it, that's a big plus. If special cases can be dealt with in userland by
people who know what they're doing, without interfering with any system stuff,
then your reliability remains high for the majority; and if the special cases
break, it's the fault of the twit that set it up who as it turns out didn't know
what he was doing!
Ben.
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