On Aug 31, 2007, at 7:23 AM, Carl Johnstone wrote:
SMTPing to localhost usually doesn't make much sence - it is slow
and as
you mentioned already it causes trouble when the daemon is down or
slow.
So either you want to do queueing overhead, dns resolving and
SMTPing to
the *remote* host yourself or you simply open(MAILER,"|sendmail
@args").
Using |sendmail means you've got the overhead of forking a separate
process, SMTP to localhost the overhead is making the socket
connection. Once it gets to your MTA it'll pretty much do the same
in either case.
Except by piping to sendmail, you can also specify -odq, which says
to sendmail 'dump this into the mail queue and return immediately, I
don't want to wait for delivery to work' which can make the
application much faster and leave the mail delivering to sendmail.
Piping to sendmail also has the disadvantage that in many cases
it'll leave [EMAIL PROTECTED] in the headers, using
SMTP means your message doesn't get mangled.
Not necessarily, if you don't manage the mail server you are
connecting to, then your headers might get mangled anyway, if you do
manage the mail server, then you can easily correct the configuration
to not leave [EMAIL PROTECTED] in the headers.
To be honest the best solution to to make use of your ISPs outgoing
mail gateway/smarthost. It'll be the most reliable mail server on
their network, and you've only got the overhead of an outgoing
socket connect.
The best solution would be to do both, use sendmail on the web server
to deliver into a local mail queue which is forwarded to the
smarthost for delivery. That way you get the advantage of having the
mail server handle the mail, while freeing you from having to write
your own version of sendmail to deal with these situations:
* What does your application do if the smarthost is getting pounded
by spammers and that outgoing socket connect fails?
* What does your applicaiton do if the smarthost is down for
maintenance or hardware failure?
In both of these cases, if you were piping to sendmail and letting
the local MTA handle the relay to the smarthost, then the mail would
simply be queued until the mail server was available again.
--
Jason Kohles
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.jasonkohles.com/
"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire
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