procmail
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Re: using procmail

2000-03-24 12:11:32
2000-03-24-13:27:30 christine_rancapero:
What's the advantage of using procmail instead of using just
sendmail?

The question as asked is a little hard to answer, because procmail
and sendmail are very different sorts of programs. A typical install
will use both. Either can be replaced with something else, but
neither replaces the other. Urrh. How to put it. The question comes
out sorta like, what's the advantage of using a fork instead of just
using a microwave oven?

Coz right now we are using sendmail and we're having a hard time
maintaining it because we have no proper documentation about the
mail server we're using and there's no one here who is really a
pro about maintaining this type of server that runs under linux
(redhat 6.0)

Sendmail is a Mail Transport Agent. It's probably the most widely
used one today. It's not the fastest, it's not the most secure,
and (most interesting from your point of view) it's definitely not
the simplest to administer. If you want to replace sendmail, I'd
strongly recommend you consider switching to either qmail[1] or
Postfix[2]. Personally I prefer the latter, find it rather simpler
to set up and maintain, but they're both fine programs. Other folks
are fond of other MTAs, including Exim[3], smail[4], and Zmailer[5].
I'm not; I find postfix plenty simple and adequately featureful, and
I love its performance and security.

Procmail is a Local Delivery Agent. A mail transport agent will use
a Local Delivery Agent to actually deposit the email in a user's
mailbox. Most or all of them come with a simple LDA, but you want to
install a separate one, like procmail[6] or maildrop[7], if you want
to offer more advanced features, like in particular user-controlled
email filtering and filing.

To re-visit your original question, sendmail and procmail do almost
completely separate jobs. The primary jobs sendmail handles are
accepting email coming in on port 25 via the SMTP protocol, or piped
into the program /usr/lib/sendmail, and either piping it into a
local delivery program (like procmail) or sending it to another
server via SMTP, over port 25.

-Bennett

[1] <URL:http://www.qmail.org/>
[2] <URL:http://www.postfix.org/>
[3] <URL:http://www.exim.org/>
[4] <URL:ftp://ftp.planix.com/pub/Smail/>
[5] <URL:http://www.zmailer.org/>
[6] <URL:http://www.procmail.org/>
[7] <URL:http://www.flounder.net/~mrsam/maildrop/>

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