On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 06:09:29AM -0800, John Nemeth wrote:
>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 frustrations at having mail problems due to the out of date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.

yes, i know.  lmtp is basically a thin smtp protocol where the sender
does the queueing.

any mda can be invoked with multiple recipients, but only lmtp allows
the mta to discover which ones specifically failed.  otoh, temporary
failure is handled already if you exit with 75.

lmtp can also deliver mail "remotely".  cyrus's deliver (as one
example) can do lmtp over inet sockets.

>     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.

there's also qmqp, though i don't expect smx (which is still not ready
for prime time) will have that.

this is all rather academic, though.  i'll look at mail.local to see
what i can do.

-- 
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