+--- In our lifetime, Alan Judge Alan.Judge@indigo.ie wrote: | | I'll have another look at qmail, but we're pretty firmly entrenched in | the sendmail camp at the moment, for a variety of reasons.
sendmail and the delivery agent have nothing to do with each other. What makes the qmail concept so cool is that there is no mbox format file. Every piece of mail is a separate file.
You can achieve the same goal by hacking the local delivery agent do the same. And you can stick with sendmail, if that is what you like.
Of course, you could have a setup that has boxes running sendmail for queue runs as well as setup as MX's. Then your sendmail box simply passes the email that is slated for local delivery to a qmail machine(s). And frankly, BSDI boxes make for amazing mail machines (very cheap!). Then you can run a hacked qpopper, the qmail-qpopper, or hack your own. This setup becomes quite fault tolerant (no single piece breaks the whole; save for the filer), scaleable (adding more boxes to do dedicated tasks is a trivial issue) and reliable (boxes doing single tasks rarely fail; in my experience (except for solaris, of course...)).
Alexei