Re: [gentoo-user] Local mail delivery agent (MDA) wanted

[Grant Taylor <gtaylor@gentoo.tnetconsulting.net>]

On 12/20/21 3:09 PM, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Delivery works on both systems

:-)

> (with a little caveat, see second-last paragraph).

;-)

> At first I believed that both systems used mail from GNU mailutils. 
> But I erred:

Ya.  Determining /which/ implementation of a command is being used can 
be ... difficult at times.

> My Gentoo NAS only has mailutils installed. But while I have that also 
> installed on Arch, I was in fact using s-nail’s mail program there. 
> Mailutils installs its mail as /usr/bin/gnu-mail instead, which allows 
> both packages to co-exist (which Gentoo does not).

Yep.  That could be an issue.  It's not bad if you are aware of it and 
can account for it.

> So I tried gnu-mail on Arch, but this does not move read mail away 
> upon exit like its Gentoo cousin.

That might be a default configuration / rc file in somewhere in /etc.

> I did more trials, wrote a lengthy description of it into this message 
> and threw them away again, so I wouldn’t bore you.

/me chuckles mildly.

I doubt that you would bore me.  I might also learn something about Arch 
and possibly even Gentoo.  But those bits have already gone through the 
circuit.  (Portmanteau of "water under the bridge"?)

> In the end I gave up, removed Gentoo’s mailutils and went with 
> s-nail. And now it works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It sounds like you've achieved your goal /and/ that we (at least you and 
I) learned some things along the way.  :-D

> Maybe building dma from source broke some stuff, because it installed 
> into /usr/local. `echo foo | mail root` (mail from mailutils) produces 
> mail that remains in dma’s queue, whereas `echo bar | sendmail root` 
> (/usr/local/sbin/ sendmail from dma) gets the mail delivered to the 
> spool file.

I would expect the `mail` and `sendmail` commands (binaries / scripts) 
to do slightly different things.  Both should accept messages on STDIN. 
But what they do with them might be different.

Leaving the message in the spool makes me think that there is 
expectation that something else, maybe even another part of DMA, will do 
something with the spooled message(s).  Maybe DMA is expecting some sort 
of cron job to work the mail queue.

> But the latter mails were missing vital headers and thus mail had a 
> problem displaying them properly.

That sounds like raw, unprocessed email to me.

> It’s all a bit voodoo-esque to my simple-minded user’s point of 
> view; confusion over many implementations of the same standard;

The wonderful thing about standards is that we have so many to choose 
from.  }:-)

> they should interoperate,

Ideally.

> but maybe don’t, or maybe I did not configure them properly.

See above comment about cron et al.

> plus the overly complex configs and info documentation on GNU’s 
> side which keeps me away. It must have been great days back in the 
> 80s. I wish I had experienced those times and machines.

Email is ... non-trivial, to put it mildly.  There are many different 
things that interact and each behaves slightly differently while doing a 
different part of the job.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die