[Mailman-Developers] vmailer and mailman

Scott scott@chronis.icgroup.com
Tue, 29 Sep 1998 13:00:56 -0400


I've been running mailman with vmailer for a number of relatively
small lists for a while now.  In general, everything works fine
between the two.  

However, On installation, I also had to wrestle with the parent UID
and GID checks on the mail-wrapper since vmailer sets those values to
various things depending on where the sender originates and, more
recently, on the ownership of the aliases file.

vmailer has decided to deal with mailling lists wrappers by handling
the problem itself:  the delivery process sets the UID and GID of the
process to the owner of the aliases file when it delivers to programs
or users in that file.

This way, there should be no need for wrapper programs to run checks
on processes started by mail.

One way this can be approached is to set the parent UID and GID in the
mail wrapper to the UID and GID of the owner of the relevant aliases
file.   Another way would be to eliminate the wrapper altogether for
these processes using vmailer.

For those of you unfamiliar with vmailer, it's an MTA by Wietse Venema
that's under the late stages of alpha testing.  It should go into
public beta testing very soon (within a week?), and it's likely that
it will be widely accepted as a sendmail replacement, judging from
Wietse's past projects and talk in the newsgroups.

I just thought it'd be a good idea to report about this combo should
anyone else be curious, and see what people thought about trying to
make mailman work out of the box a little more easily with vmailer.
Is it worth checking for in configure to decide whether or not the
mail-wrapper is necessary?

scott