Re: Qmail book
On Wed, 22 Sep 1999, Kevin Waterson wrote: Is there a qmail book? There answer is on http://www.qmail.org, along with answers to tons of other questions about qmail. jms
Re: US Senate outsources email management
On 7 Jun 1999, John Conover wrote: http://www.currents.net/newstoday/99/06/07/news12.html is kind of interesting-it mentions server issues. Isn't qmail running on a *BSD PC capable of doing 100K-300K emails a day? Does anyone know what kind of system the Senate currently uses? Looks like Solstice Internet Mail Server (Sun product) Connected to mail.senate.gov. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mailsims1.senate.gov -- Server ESMTP (Sun Internet Mail Server sims.3.5.1999.03.02.17.58.p5) jms
Re: headers in other languages (simple Y/N)
Eric Dahnke writes: Do the Subject: From: and To: lines within message headers always read Subject: From: and To: without being translated into another language? Yes. RFC 822 doesn't really make provisions for headers to be translated into other languages at the MTA level. I see that the headers are occasionally translated into other languages, but I'm fairly sure it is the e-mail client which does it. That's the right place to do it. The client is normally responsible for that work, which would fall under "cosmetics" or "pretty-printing". jms
Re: directory hashing algorithim
On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Joe Garcia wrote: So I need a good directory hashing algorithim beyond last/first name for example. Maildir is located under the users home directory. I want their homedir location to be something that would distribute the load more evenly, instead of something like /home/smith/joe/Maildir. What I came up with some time ago was a hash of the first three characters of the username, which could be a-z0-9. Cases where the username wasn't long enough, or there was a "bad" character in the first three, it's replaced or padded out with an infrequently used letter, like "q" or "x", e.g. user "jsmith" would hash out to /maildrop/j/s/m/jsmith user "a1" would hash out to /maildrop/a/1/x/ae user "x-ray" would hash out to /maildrop/x/x/r/x-ray jms
Re: Qmail Queue mounted via NFS?
On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote: + "Robert J. Adams" [EMAIL PROTECTED]: | Is it possible to have two machines accessing the same queue via NFS? No! Your single copy of qmail-send assumes it is the only entity making any changes in the queue (with the exception of qmail-queue, which does however follow a specific protocol for inserting new messages). Break that assumption, and you're breaking qmail. You should always have the queue on a local disk anyway, for reliability as well as efficiency considerations. Amen. You can use an NFS filestore for mail drops if you use Maildir, but definitely not the queue. You'd run a very high risk of corrupting messages in the queue if you NFS'd it across machines. jms
Re: Qmail Queue mounted via NFS?
On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Robert J. Adams wrote: If we are speaking about reliability.. what if the local machine croaks.. then anything in the queue (of that local machine) is lost.. that isn't acceptable. Not necessarily. If the queue disk wasn't blown out when the machine croaked, then you can force a run of the queue when the machine comes back up and you're in good shape. That said, how would you distribute the queue across several machines, performance and reliability questions aside? NFS won't do it, I'll tell you that much. What if your central server were to croak in the middle of injecting a message into the queue (e.g. physically committing it to disk)? Same rules apply... If your central server were to go down, none of the machines could adequately function because they couldn't contact the host machine to insert a message into the queue. That would actually detract from reliability because your whole mail cluster would depend on having one machine up and accessible at all times. There are options for distributing filesystems using more than one central server (Coda, Transarc's AFS/DFS, etc), but these are either not totally production-ready, support only a very limited number of platforms, or their performance in write-intensive applications such as a mail queue isn't known. I'll accept the gamble of having a separate queue on each machine rather than one large centralized queue. An NFS mailstore, with RAID 0+1 queue is acceptable for my needs. jms
Re: UNSUBSCRIBE !!!!
On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, Jay D. Dyson wrote: UNSUBSCRIBE !! Hmm... maybe it's time to gun up a patch that counts the total number of bytes/words in the body of an email and if a case-insensitive "unsubscribe" makes up a large enough portion, reply to the sender with a "hey you can't unsubscribe this way. send your request to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to unsubscribe". jms
Re: UNSUBSCRIBE !!!!
On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Jay D. Dyson wrote: Excuse me, but PLEASE GET YOUR ATTRIBUTION RIGHT. My apologies. Calm down. I did not send the "screaming unsubscribe" message. Some lost soul at usia.gov did that, and I really do not care to be confused with someone as clueless. Thanks. Again, my apologies. I should have looked more closely when trimming the fat off of my reply. jms
Re: Denial of service process table attacks
On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, Mark Delany wrote: At 05:31 23/02/99 -, you wrote: On http://lwn.net/daily/ptable.html is a description of denial of service process table attacks. Am I correct that tcpserver limits fork() calls to a specified number, and therefore alleviates the situation? Correct. As long as you run all of your services via tcpserver. Too bad similar protection isn't currently available for udp and RPC services :-) jms
Re: New Configuration--Partition size
On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, MountaiNet Tech Support wrote: I am configuring a new machine for qmail. The machine is a Dual 400 with 512 Meg of RAM. Currently we will be using an 18gig drive (RAID 5 setup) for e-mail only. What would be the best way to partition this drive for qmail to allow for queue and everything for optimal performance? Also, if later I add another drive to it increasing it to 27 gig, how hard will it be to add this extra space to my /home dir for additional storage? How big of a swap file should I make? That all depends a lot on your usage patterns and anticipated load. If you anticipate lots of load, I would honestly put the queue on its own disk at a minimum. Multiple smaller disks running in a RAID 0 or 0+1 would be better for the queue. RAID 5 is nice for survivability but you pay a bit of a performance penalty on disk writes. considering how much activity goes on in qmail's queue, every microsecond of latency on those disks can have a big impact if your system gets hammered one day or your usage patterns change drastically. I would also go with something like having your OS/binaries on one disk, your queue on another, and your mailstore itself on the RAID 5 set, with careful balancing of swap as needed. What OS are you using? jms
Re: Million users
On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, Matthew Kirkwood wrote: No (or few) technical reasons. The same reasons that my work uses Solaris for everything expect a few routers and lightly loaded proxies. By the time you deal with 1M mails a day (and not mailing list traffic) you want a little more resilience to whatever failures may come.. While Solaris is good in those regards, a well-built *BSD box will provide plenty of resilience. jms
Re: QMail keeps dying
On Tue, 29 Dec 1998, Rick McMillin wrote: We are having a big problem. We have an array of three servers with QMail running on each server. The problem is that QMail keeps dying. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to this or anything. We are running Solaris 2.6. We're running QMail 1.03 using Maildir format with Tcpserver being used also. Please be more specific. What exactly happens when you say "qmail is dying"? Is anything showing up in the logs? Please tell us more about your configuration. jms
Re: Where to start?
On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, Subba Rao wrote: There are no instructions, on how to compile Qmail. I downloaded Qmail 1.03 for linux. Where do I start? I find lot of intructions, HOWTO remove sendmail. How is that useful, without being able to compile Qmail and configure Qmail? Try the INSTALL file. I think you'll find what you need there. jms
