Sascha Lucky Luck wrote:
> Thus spoke Dave Rynne:
> > There's a patch out there to make procmail support Maildir so if
> > you config sendmail to use procmail as your local delivery agent,
> > then you can deliver into Maildir. A bit messy but then so is
> > sendmail...
> I think that qualifies as a "Nasty Hack". As for sendmail being messy - that was my point, wasn't it?
now this is silly. i often think it would make more sense to shred
sendmail's current method of rule parsing and switch to something like
perl or scheme (insert holy war here). but calling using procmail a
nasty hack is just, well, ignorant.
sendmail is an mta - a mail transfer agent. it's quite religious about
this. with the exception of smtp - a standard - it leaves message
*delivery* up to a third party. this is why you can have sendmail
deliver to the various flavors of uucp, some weird methods of sending
mail via ftp, the various file based methods, etc.. it does this by
invoking a third party to do the delivery.
so it used to be normal to deliver file based mail with a program
called, obviously, mail. on some sytems this would speak mbox, others
would speak mmdf (gack). and whatever this maildir format is, something
understands it (procmail) and sendmail can deliver to that with no
change to sendmail. in fact several linux distributions uses procmail
in lieu of mail (and procmail docs have long described how people can do
that, and the m4 routines have long supported a procmail local delivery
agent).
therefore ***by it's very design*** the only way for it to support
Maildir is with an external program. now if the patch to procmail
involves adding a perl interpreter that runs a perl script that
implements a turing machine that then loads a tape that will first
transform the incoming message and the mailbox into ebcidic add the
message and finally retransform them into ascii - that would be an ugly
*procmail* hack. following the overall design of sendmail is doubtfully
even a hack, never mind an ugly one.
sheesh.
kevin
--
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