Re: QMAIL and a WARNING on Smail

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Tittsler <jwt@example.com> writes:

    Jim> I installed QMAIL on one of the machines in the office last
    Jim> week.  It is a smallish replacement for Sendmail that has
    Jim> some interesting features.
[snip]
    Jim> I found a copy in the ftp.redhat.com:/pub/contrib collection.

Well, I didn't, and I went through all the reasonable places.  There
was, however, no /pub/contrib/by-group/Mail directory, so that might
explain it.

I just had to rebuild Smail 1.3.29.1.  It seems that the Smail
binaries distributed in various places have broken locking as far as
kernel v2.0.0 (for shame, Steve, using such an ancient kernel!) is
concerned.  This doesn't cause problems most of the time.  However, if
for some reason Smail fails to deliver a message, it puts the message
along with a history file in a couple of subdirectories of the spool
directory (typically /var/spool/smail/{input,msglog,retry} or
similar).  It is these files where the locking was having conniptions, 
and a later queue run to retry delivery of failed messages would fail
again.

I will take a look around and see if there is a more recent version.

One bonus is that doing it right is *much* faster; it used to take
quite a while to redeliver fifteen or twenty messages, but now it
happens while you wait---oops, it's done already!  That could also be
due to the fact that I've mucked with a couple of other configuration
parameters, in particular I now deliver direct to most hosts rather
than through a local mail host.

If anyone else is out there using Smail with a kernel ver > 1.99,
check your /var/spool/smail/input directory to see if there are any
undelivered messages.  If so, use 'runq' (aka 'smail -q') to see if it
redelivers correctly.  If it doesn't I will make my binary available
to you (I'd like to clean some stuff up first).

If you want to build it yourself, I had some problems with 'make' and 'libdbm.
a', and screwed with EDITME as well, so you might want to ask for some
advice before going at it.

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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