Re: [Evolution] MTA/MDA/Mail clients

[Tony Earnshaw <tonye billy demon nl>]

tor, 15.01.2004 kl. 17.18 skrev pkm:

> I do have one comment regarding the whole mail sending/retrieval
> strategy. I don't understand why evolution (and many other mail clients)
> try to take on the role of the MTA. fetchmail and many sendmail clones
> have been around for quite some time, and work well when configured
> properly.

There's no such thing as a Sendmail clone, luckily. There are several
MTA dropins that use a surrogate sendmail binary; I use Exim 4 and
Postfix 2, which can both be called as 'sendmail'. But both are utterly
different to configure and don't have many of Sendmail's disadvantages.

>  I am a little dissappointed that I can not have fetchmail run
> when I press the 'Send/Receive' button, or have any control over the
> options passed to sendmail.

Why use fetchmail at all? It's an MTA utility (a bit like an artificial
limb, actually), not an MUA utility and Evo doesn't need it. As to any
"options passed to sendmail", I fear you're getting things mixed up. Evo
uses smtp as originally defined in rfcs 821 and 822 - and since extended
and improved with myriads of other rfcs, to most of which Evo adheres
far better than do many other clients. Passing options to Sendmail has
nothing to do with smtp - why should everybody use Sendmail anyway? I
don't. smtp deals transparently with *every* rfc-compliant MTA.

> In addition, while skimming through the mailing lists, I've noticed a
> number of emails from people who are interested in piping email to a
> program, or redirecting it somewhere, filtering it in some way (perhaps
> using spamassassin or another spam agent).

Many Evo users are already doing this. Stick around, or *don't* skim
through the mailing list archives, search methodically and you'll find
out how.

>  The solutions to these
> questions frequently seem to be something along the lines of, "We're
> getting that feature into 1.5" or something like it. Programming in
> static support for spam filtering (or any filtering, for that matter)
> seems a little redundant when this can all be accomplish via procmail.

Procmail, again, is an MTA utility, not an MUA utility. Though many
people on this list are using it for Evo. Quite another thing might be
building Bayes statistics into Evo, as that has been done for Mozilla,
but that's something else.

--Tonni

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