• UUCP showstopper?

    From yeti@yeti@tilde.institute to tilde.projects on Wed Apr 21 07:44:14 2021
    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:

    - Only sendmail and courier can use this.

    - Postfix can only throw mail directly at a recipient or all unknown
    stuff at a smarthost. This behaviour is ok for very(!) small
    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'm currently low on motivation for this topic, so there probably will
    not be good news soon.

    Don't stay tuned.

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  • From John Goerzen@jgoerzen@complete.org to tilde.projects on Tue Sep 7 01:24:15 2021
    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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