Mailing List Archive

qmail-remote delivers in blind
Hi,

A week ago I have switched from sendmail to qmail. Yes,
security issue is very important for me. In principle,
I like qmail design concept. Also an installation of qmail
to work with Smartlist and Majordomo listservers was pretty
easy.

But I have noticed a stange detail how qmail handles
recipient's adresses. It seems that qmail does not analyze
a list of recipients and delivers in blind a message for each
recipient address separately. It is very costy to send
a message for a large list of users on the same remote host.
So, instead of sending a single message to remote host
(on which the message could be distributed locally),
qmail sends the same message for each remote user separately
(and in parallel, that is controlled by concurrentremote
parameter).

An experiment I have performed was as follows. I have send
a large message from my host to three users on the same
remote host:
user1@remotehost, user2@remotehost, user3@remotehost

and then I was looking with 'ps' how qmail works. I have
noticed 3 processes:

qmail-remote remotehost user1@remotehost
qmail-remote remotehost user2@remotehost
qmail-remote remotehost user3@remotehost

But I was expected to see

qmail-remote remotehost user1@remotehost user2@remotehost user3@remotehost

I do dot see any reason to send a message separately
(and in parallel) when recipients reside on the same
remote host. I prefer that qmail-remote will be launched
for each different remote host but not for each remote user.

Is it a bug (or unimplemented feature) of qmail ? Maybe something
is missed in my configuration ? I am running qmail on Linux 2.0.27.

Any ideas ?

========================================================
Vytautas Vysniauskas e-mail: vytasvy@osf.lt
tel: +370-2-611408
UNIX systems administrator
Open Society Fund of Lithuania,
========================================================
Re: qmail-remote delivers in blind [ In reply to ]
On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Icarus Sparry wrote:

> No it is neither a bug, nor an unimplemented feature. It is documented
> as a deliberate design choice. If you have a lot of people on one remote
> machine then you should either run a mailing list exploder on that machine
> or else look at the 'serialmail' package.
>
> Icarus
>

But what about a posibility to implement the feature in qmail. Simply
to introduce a new parameter in controls/ , say,

maxnames

which limits the size of a list of recipients in a single message.
setting maxnames=1, a default qmail behavior will be emmulated,
when maxnames=-1, qmail-send should collect all user names which
belong to the same remote host and deliver in a single message;
when maxnames>1 then qmail behaviour would be similar to
Smartlist's choplist feature. I think, very minimal changes in
qmail souce code are necessary to implement this feature.
At least no changes are required in qmail-remote (because it can
accept a list of multipple recipients). Probably, only qmail-send
must be patched. It is difficult for me to say exactly what changes
are needed, since I am a new with qmail source code...

Does anybody is interested to implement this feature ?

Vytas.
Re: qmail-remote delivers in blind [ In reply to ]
At 09:30 PM 2/17/97 -0600, Jeff T. Carneal wrote:
>On the many lists where I have sung the praises of qmail (and, boy have I)
>the main complaint I receive relates to this one. Sites with smaller
>connections complain that it kills their bandwidth and such. I for one
>would be glad to see it so I could maybe get a few more qmail converts :-)

The problem with this idea is that is breaks VERP. VERP is most useful for
mailing
lists, and yet mailing lists are the only place where you're going to be sending
a lot of mail to users on the same host.
-russ
Re: qmail-remote delivers in blind [ In reply to ]
On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Vytautas Vysniauskas wrote:

>
> On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Icarus Sparry wrote:
>
> > No it is neither a bug, nor an unimplemented feature. It is documented
> > as a deliberate design choice. If you have a lot of people on one remote
> > machine then you should either run a mailing list exploder on that machine
> > or else look at the 'serialmail' package.
> >
> > Icarus
> >
>
> But what about a posibility to implement the feature in qmail. Simply
> to introduce a new parameter in controls/ , say,
>
> maxnames
>
> which limits the size of a list of recipients in a single message.
> setting maxnames=1, a default qmail behavior will be emmulated,
> when maxnames=-1, qmail-send should collect all user names which
> belong to the same remote host and deliver in a single message;
> when maxnames>1 then qmail behaviour would be similar to
> Smartlist's choplist feature. I think, very minimal changes in
> qmail souce code are necessary to implement this feature.
> At least no changes are required in qmail-remote (because it can
> accept a list of multipple recipients). Probably, only qmail-send
> must be patched. It is difficult for me to say exactly what changes
> are needed, since I am a new with qmail source code...
>
> Does anybody is interested to implement this feature ?

On the many lists where I have sung the praises of qmail (and, boy have I)
the main complaint I receive relates to this one. Sites with smaller
connections complain that it kills their bandwidth and such. I for one
would be glad to see it so I could maybe get a few more qmail converts :-)

'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'
`' Jeff Carneal / Sys Admin \ Apex Internet `'
`' jeff@apex.net http://www.apex.net `'
`' The opinions expressed above aren't really mine. They belong to `'
`' someone else who also refuses to take responsibility for them. `'
'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'