[plug] This Mailing list

[John Summerfield]

> On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Christian wrote:
> 
> > John Summerfield wrote:
> > >
> > > Highly improbable; if sendmail were that bad, nobody at all would use it.
> > > However, sendmail is, if not the most-used MTA, then close to it. Plug's
> > > list is hardly a high-activity one.
> > 
> > I've heard it often repeated that sendmail doesn't work well with large
> > lists. 
> 
> I think it boils down the the fact that sendmail is optimised for "normal"
> email patterns (ie one recipient per message) which is why it may not be 
> as fast handling large mailing lists as QMail might be, which I'm told
> is optimised for large numbers of recipients per message.

If there are two or more recipients at a single destination (including, I 
think, mx host) for a message, sendmail sends it once.


I suspect most of the complaints about sendmail are people repeating 
rumours and complaints others have made in years gone by. In many cases, 
complaints might be out of context - doubtless if there are hundreds of 
thousands of messages, sendmail will use significant resources. For a few 
hundreds of messages, the load isn't noticeable.

Sendmail is difficult to configure, true, iff you try to write a 
sendmail.cf from scratch. If you use the m4 macroes that ship with recent 
sendmails it's pretty simple.

It's true that sendmail has had its share of bugs; in my memory other 
software (notably bind) has had many more.

It may be that qmail, postfix and even smail are better in some way than 
sendmail, but if all your mail is going through a modem, you ware not 
going to find any of them performing measurably better. And, in the 
context of the list, all the mail on the list goes through numerous 
modems, most of it through two.

-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.