On May 16,  9:33am, Michael Graff wrote:
} John Nemeth <jnemeth@cue.bc.ca> writes:
} > On May 9,  2:42pm, Wolfgang Rupprecht wrote:
} > } 
} > } Actually, much of the spam that homeworld.cygnus.com forwards could be
} > } stopped with the current sendmail 8.9.0 run as a front-end filter for
} > } qmail doing the final delivery.  (Phony "from" filtering and
} > } spam-software-only header filtering does a surprisingly thorough job.)
} 
} How hard would it be to add this to qmail?  I can't imagine it is that

     Not easy.  It would require changes to the source code.  qmail
isn't very flexible.  It doesn't have a built-in macro/configuration
language like sendmail does.

} hard, and I also can't imagine that filtering on "From " or "From:" can

     Checking for invalid envelope return addresses cuts out about
half of the spam.

} really catch spam...  people will just list lamer@aol.com or
} evenlamer@msn.com there.

     This sort of thing would catch a significant per centage of the
remaining spam.

     Of course spammers will get smarter.  This is another example of
the classic arms race.

} >      Having one MTA feed another is not only silly, but grossly
} > wasteful of resources.  However, it would be nice if homeworld didn't
} > run qmail, since it is grossly wasteful of bandwidth.
} 
} But, for mailing lists, that helps a lot.  Having the list manage itself
} is much nicer than having some list maintainer have to kick in all the
} time.

     qmail doesn't manage mailing lists, it's an MTA.  The NetBSD
Foundation uses majordomo to manage its mailing lists.  qmail is a
very bad mta to use for handling mailing lists since it sends
everybody a seperate message instead of sending a single message with
multiple recipients specified.  This is a gross waste of bandwidth.
There's no way that you can convince me that sending multiple copies
of a message uses less bandwidth then sending a single copy to
multiple people.  That's an absurd notion.  Also, qmail will open
multiple simultaneous connections to a remote site.  This is a gross
abuse of resources at the remote site.  It also won't get the mail
through any faster, since the pipe is only so big.

     I was rather disappointed when I noticed that the The NetBSD
Foundation had changed to qmail on it's mail server.

}-- End of excerpt from Michael Graff