Subject: Re: Mail list envelope sender address
To: None <current-users@NetBSD.ORG>
From: D. J. Bernstein <djb@koobera.math.uic.edu>
List: current-users
Date: 11/25/1996 22:51:18
Perry Metzger writes:
> qmail beats the crap out of a site like AOL by sending thirty copies

No. qmail spreads the load evenly among AOL's 44 mail exchangers.

In contrast, sendmail crams all its deliveries into a single host. Do
you realize what happens when that one host is overloaded?

> not to mention what happens to some poor country like Kenya.

What happens to some poor country like Kenya is that qmail uses _less_
bandwidth, saving money and improving response times. It saves more than
enough in DNS lookups to wipe out the loss in SMTP compression.

Why do you find it so difficult to understand that bandwidth is a
_shared_ resource? In a typical case, yes, I'm doubling 0.02% of the
traffic, but I'm also chopping 0.14% of the traffic in half.

Latency is different. It is _not_ shared. Every message must get through
on time. If a user has a crucial message delayed by two hours, he won't
care about billions of messages that were delivered in two seconds.

> However, as I've said already, this is NOT the qmail bashing list.

Fine. Take your delusions to comp.mail.misc; I'll address them there.

---Dan
Sick of sendmail? Don't get mad; get qmail. http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html