On Jun 8,  5:10pm, Andrew Brown wrote:
} >jnemeth@victoria.tc.ca (John Nemeth) writes:
} >> On Jun 2, 12:09pm, "Perry E. Metzger" wrote:
} 
} >> } the lack of LMTP is a significant problem. On the latter, I have to
} >> } confess I've never felt its lack...
} >>
} >>      However, that would be you.  My message was sent because of
} >> frustrations at having mail problems due to the out of date
} >> mail.local.  I have this strange idea that something named mail.local
} >> should behave the same as the one supplied with sendmail.
} 
} whereas i have this kooky idea that mail.local just delivers mail
} locally.  otoh, cyrus's deliver can do lmtp out of the box...

     It does just deliver mail locally.  LMTP provides a couple of
advantages.  The first is that if a message has multiple recipients,
sendmail can simply tell the delivery agent about all of them, and then
let it write the message into all of the mailboxes instead of having to
invoke a seperate copy of the delivery agent for each recipient.  The
second is that with LMTP, the delivery agent can return more detailed
error reports in the event of a problem.  Hmm, a third advantage that
comes to mind is that with LMTP, the delivery agent can return a
temporary failure in the event of a problem such as the permissions on
a mailbox being screwed up.  In this case, sendmail would queue the
message locally, instead of immediately bouncing it.

     A final argument is that it appears that Sendmail X will require
an LMTP capable local delivery agent.  This means that it can use
pretty much the same mechanism to send mail no matter where it is being
sent.

}-- End of excerpt from Andrew Brown