Spam and MTAs [Was Re: [chat] RE: [SLUG] Statement of Attainment in Linux]

[Crossfire <xfire@xxxxxxxx>]

Terry Collins was once rumoured to have said:
> 
> ...snip.....
> 
>> For the uninitiated, I suggest reading the OpenBSD thread between Theo 
>> and DJB over Theo's decision to drop qmail from packages to avoid violating 
>> djb's license, which resulted in djb complaining that they were dropping 
>> his mailer.
> 
> Is it just the spam I receive?
> I seem to see a lot of spam through qmail installations.

Huh?

The violation thing was the fact that OpenBSD packages patches qmail, its
against the license to distribute patched qmail.

As for spamming, yes - qmail is rediculously popular for no good reason.
I used to do High Performance bulk-mailing when I worked at bidorbuy to the
subscribed newsletter lists (Yeah, some people used to call this spamming -
I only did it because it was an opt-in at join thing - we didn't harvest at
all) - which the original sysadmins set up using qmail.  None the less, qmail
is the WRONG THING when you're trying to get network efficency so you can get 
your delivery rate up.

I managed to get our average job length (roughly 700,000 addresses) from 3 
days to about 5 hours by switching from qmail to sendmail and writting some
scripts and tools to do destination host bundling, which allowed our MTA to 
bundle messages correctly and cut network traffic sharply.  (And on a 
side-note:  setting your inbound MTA to refuse large envelopes is futile, and 
VERY stupid when you're paying per bandwidth - you force those of us who are 
trying to be network polite to break envelopes more often resulting in your 
host being hammered for more bandwidth sure - it'll slow down dumb mailers,
but anybody who is paying attention can easily notice it and adjust their 
mailer - its certainly what we did at bidorbuy.)

When you're not retransmitting the same chunk of message body a few thousand 
times to the same host, you not only reduce their inbound traffic, you reduce 
the time it takes you to send it...

C.
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