From: Juergen Daubert <juergen.daubert@t-online.de>
  To  : <masqmail@marmaro.de>
  Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:43:11 +0200

Re: [masqmail] What masqmail intends to be

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 01:05:02AM +0200, markus schnalke wrote:
> Hoi,

Hello Markus,

> 
> I thought about masqmail's goal today. But first let me explain my
> path of thoughts:

thanks for sharing your thougths, a few remarks below. 

> I removed the POP3 stuff (1300 SLOC) today (from 0.3.0). Then I
> reasoned about the configure option --disable-resolver,
> --disable-smtp-server, and especially --enable-maildir. Let's take the
> last one as example
> 
> 
> What is the advantage of this --enable-maildir option? My first
> thought was security, because if you compile less code into a
> security-critical program, then there are less lines that introduce
> bugs. Additionally, if you haven't compiled it in, then it is surely
> not available. This might be an argument for the smtp server support,
> but hardly for 130 lines of maildir code.
> 
> Over time, I came to the feeling that oku focused on small executable
> size a lot. The reason could be that he developed masqmail for
> embedded systems. (That's just a guess.) Again, for 130 lines of
> maildir code it doesn't make sense.
> 
> What I see is that this configure option makes masqmail more
> complicated than neccesary. The #ifdefs make the code less readable,
> documentation and install howtos are more complex. But what is gained?
> I think nothing. Hence, I want to remove these (almost) unneccesary
> configure options.
> 
> The question, however, is whether maildir support should be removed
> from masqmail (and transferred to the MDA) or if it should always be
> compiled in. I'm not sure. I like using an MDA for any non-trivial
> delivery. (mbox support will stay as fallback.) Is masqmail's maildir
> code correct and secure? By transferring the job onto the MDA, we need
> not to care, and they probably do a better job with this anyway. But
> if you think that the maildir support is important for masqmail, I
> don't care much about the 130 lines. They just will be compiled in
> always.

I'd say it the other way around: masqmail delivers mail to the users 
INBOX mbox or can optionally use an MDA for that. 

If masqmail is used as a replacement for a "big" MTA like exim other 
system daemons like cron are depending on it. Not sure if I want a
MDA in the delivery chain for that case as a must have. 

If the users system INBOX, often /var/spool/mail/<user>, is always or 
at least in most cases a standard mbox no maildir support is necessary
IMO. Dunno how the big distris handle this.

> 
> Does anyone know a reason why one would like to --disable-resolver?
> I discovered, that BSD have the contents of libresolv inside their
> libc, but my NetBSD 4.0 provided a stub libresolv though. Linking it
> or not didn't make a difference.
> 
> 
> For --disable-smtp-server, I think that it always should be enabled.
> If masqmail should not act as SMTP server, you just do not start it as
> daemon (-bd) and everthing is fine.
> 
> 
> .. and here we are at masqmail's goal: Is it important that masqmail
> can be built without the SMTP server produce a smaller binary? Do we
> want to cover this niche?

I don't see a real reson for it.

> What's the niche that masqmail want's to cover?
> 
> What does masqmail better that other MTAs?

Nothing, but it's real power is the very flexible handling of delivery 
to different mailhubs via route files. I guess masqmail has never
delivered direct to the recipient of a mail outside the local network. 
So maping of user -> mailhup(s) -> adresses(s) is one of the important 
parts of masqmail. Sure, you can do that at least with exim too, but it's
much more complicated to achieve the same functionality you have with
route-files and the easy switch to a different mailhub via online_file.

msmtp is one mail forwarder that works very well and flexible for such
task too, but it's only a forwarder lacking everything else masqmail has,
like queueing or delivery to local mailboxes. But it has build-in TLS
support ;)

> 
> Where do other MTAs fail, but masqmail not or less?
> 
> 
> I think we agree that masqmail is not suited for large mail servers
> but for workstations, notebooks, and small home servers. These are
> typically not administrated by people who can setup sendmail in an
> hour. Other mail servers are difficult to setup too, that's what my
> experience showed.
> 
> Hence, masqmail should be easier to configure. This for instance means
> that it should few configure options, because choice is a problem.
> 
> But masqmail's flexibility with the routes is surely a strength that
> should be extended.
> 
> Simple forwarders already exist in larger number. Masqmail provides a
> ``real'' MTA, which these don't.
> 
> Local delivery will be available by default with 0.3.0. Masqmail will
> listen on `localhost:25' by default. This would collide with the
> --disable-smtp-server option.

Oops, what do you mean with by default? It listen to localhost:25 even
if not configured to do so in masqmail.conf with listen_addresses?


Greetings
Juergen

-- 
Juergen Daubert  |  mailto:jue@jue.li  
Korb, Germany    |  http://jue.li/crux