On 2021-04-21, yeti <
yeti@tilde.institute> wrote:
I started using postfix on my UUCP labrats, later added dovecot.
So far that works nice.
Looking for infos about UUCP maps and pathalias (mail routing), I was
told:
Probably this is going to be a lot of trouble to maintain. I have
been looking into it in NNCP contexts, and may yet use it, but it is a
bit of a hassle.
A hub-and-spoke arrangement may be more suitable. For instance, have
some "hubs" that basically know which other "hub" every given site can
be reached from. This would mean that leaf nodes don't have to have a
full routing table, and hubs can have a simpler problem.
- Only sendmail and courier can use this.
I'd be surprised if courier could call out to pathalias. sendmail
probably can in some obscure way. Though pathalias output can
probably be munged into a format that Postfix or Exim could use also.
- Postfix can only throw mail directly at a recipient or all unknown
stuff at a smarthost. This behaviour is ok for very(!) small
I would be shocked if that were true. Isn't this what the transport
map is for? Exim certainly can do this, and I seem to remember from
when I used Postfix years ago that it could also.
communities (direct contact only) or for leaf systems which mainly use
a smarthost.
Switching to courier can replace dovecot too, so MTA and the major
protocols (SMTP, IMAP(S), POP(S), ...) come out of one hand.
I've run Courier and it's.... weird, and a bit tempermental. Not
really in the tradition of a Unix mail server, though I suppose moreso
than qmail.
Another option of sorts would be NNCP. NNCP is source-routed like
UUCP, but NNCP's config file can give a default path to a given node.
Another NNCP feature is that you can give it a partial route to a
node. For instance, if you have A<->B<->C<->D and are sending from A
to B, and B knows to route to D via C, you can just say to route it
via B and the B will figure out it has to go to C. This is sort of a protocol-level implementation of the hub-and-spoke idea.
I hope to work with pathalias on it with my public relay but haven't
quite gotten there yet. For the moment, it works well enough without
pathalias when there is a tree topology with one major hub at the
center, but maybe would be less ideal if there are multiple hubs of
equal importance.
- John
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