Hi John,
% Not sure what you mean here. Do you mean Perl parsers aren't as quick on
% NT or that NT is not very good as a mail server?
The mail server programs that run on NT do not seem to have
the robustness and flexibility that I am used to in a
traditional unix environment.
Well, of course sendmail running on a dedicated UNIX box will knock any
other mail system dead, but bear in mind we are not all the owners of
large ISPs, and some of us (such as me) would not even be able to set up
the DNS side of sendmail, let alone any other aspect.
My own situation is a small business with room for only _one_ server in
the corner of the office. I chose NT for this purpose, but avoided
Exchange/Outlook as everyone in the world seems to hate it, and I think
they are probably right. I use the (almost) freeware Mercury/32 written
by David Harris of Pegasus mail fame. This runs in virtually zero
memory, and uses virtually zero CPU except when large MPEGs are
streaming in. You can filter using regex, manage mailing lists and IMAP
is on the way. You then get strict relay, authenticated SMTP, IP
interfaces and selectable ports, plus scheduling module for kicking the
mail queue up at the upstream provider. We then us Outlook Express on
the desktops for the POP3 client access.
However, there are some annoyances when it comes to MHonArc
compatibility, and this caused some arguments over on the Merc list
recently. There is an excellent archiving system built into M/32 which
can rotate on a yearly basis but:
1. It strips out some very handy headers such as "in-reply-to" and the
originating IP.
2. The message separator is not PERL friendly due to a blank line, so
you have to pre-process the archives.
Using filters you can instead stream raw *.cnm files to appropriate
folders on the hard drive. You can then use a batch or WSH script file
to invoke MHonArc with the -mhpattern command line parameter to process
the messages.
--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)
