Hi! Anand Buddhdev has provided me very good answers on Serialmail and
ETRN and I thought I should share it with others and also let the answers
be archived by the mailing list.
Thank you very much Anand Buddhdev!
-- Forwarded message --
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 11:02:18 +0300
From: Anand Buddhdev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Goh Sek Chye <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: question on Serialmail and ETRN
On Sat, Jul 24, 1999 at 12:01:29PM +0800, Goh Sek Chye wrote:
> Hi! Sorry to trouble you here.
Hello Goh. No trouble at all.
> I read your posting below from the mailing list archive for qmail.
>
> I am getting very confused here and I need some enlightenment about
> qmail/serailmail.
>
> 1. qmail alone cannot support ETRN command. You must install serialmail to
> enable qmail to support ETRN command (True/False)?
Sort of true and false. qmail on its own does not support ETRN, and
probably never will. This is because qmail's author likes writing
modular software, where each little program does one thing, and does it
well. So to get funtionality similar to ETRN, you install serialmail,
which can also help in other instances. For example, if you look on the
qmail homepage, and look for "turnmail", you will see it is a use of
serialmail without ETRN, but with POP instead.
> 2. I have a server (running sendmail) acting as a secondary mail server
> for all my ISDN customer with different domain. Currently, they are using
> ETRN to nudge sendmail to push any new mails for their doamin to their
> mail server (the MX record with higher priority for their domain)
That's usually the standard way of doing it with sendmail.
> I want to use qmail/serialmail instead of sendmail. From your answer to
> the posting below, can I say that my customer do not need to change any
> thing (continue to use ETRN) if I migrate from sendmail to
> qmail/serialmail?
Correct.
> As I have quite a number of my customer using Microsoft Exchange Server,
> can I also say that I should patch qmail as described in your posting
> below?
qmail will work fine with MS Exchange. We have anumber of such customers
here. However, I heard somebody had trouble with MS Exchange because it
was looking for the 250-ETRN response to the EHLO command. Since qmail
itself doesn't support ETRN, it doesn't advertise it in its response. I
see no harm it patching qmail-smtpd with a few lines of code to
advertise ETRN and return a "250 Ok" to an ETRN. Try using the system
without patching first. If you have problems, then patch it as I
described.
> 3. After reading through serialmail docs, am I right to say that
> serialmail will store mails for each different domain in their respective
> directories?
Correct. The directory name will be the IP address of the customer.
> Does this mean that once my customer makes a smtp connection and issue
> ETRN, qmail will know exactly which directory the mails for the domain are
> stored and deliver it from there to the customer mail server(MX record
> with higher preference) ?
Small correction here. With the qmail model, the issue of lower/higher
MX records becomes irrelevant. With sendmail, you had:
MX 10 customer
MX 20 isp.mail.server
This is because sendmail, when kicked with an ETRN, will still do MX
processing as usual. With qmail, the serialmail package doesn't use MX
records (since it's designed for serial links, not routed links).
Therefore, your customer's domain will only have one MX record, like
this:
10 MX isp.mail.server.
All their mail will be stored in the maildir. When they connect, and
either send an ETRN, *or* even just send email, serialmail will be
triggered, and it will deliver the mail out of the customer's directory
to their IP address.
> If this is true, I am really impressed. This is a very well designed
> piece of software (in contrast with sendmail which will have to go through
> all its queue to single out if there are any new mails for the domain in
> response to ETRN )
Very true. qmail and it's auxilliary packages, like serialmail, are
impressive pieces of software. They're small, fast, modular, easy to use
and understand, and best of all, free!
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