[Mimedefang] compare mimedefang to mailscanner

[David F. Skoll]

John Rudd wrote:

>> 1) Disk I/O: MIMEDefang will use less disk I/O than Mailscanner
>> because you're not queueing every mail message twice.  In fact, if
>> you have a modern version of Sendmail with SuperSafe set to
>> PostMilter and MIMEDefang rejects or tempfails a message, that
>> queue file won't be sync'd to disk.

> In my experience, this wasn't really a problem.   Mailscanner wants your
> mqueue.in, mqueue, and scratch area to all be on one partition so that
> it can just do "mv" commands to move things around.  So you don't really
> re-queue much if you don't want to (depending on how you hand things
> off to the outgoing sendmail process).

Ah, ok.  On Solaris, "mv" may be synchronous.  On Linux, you really
should fsync the directory to ensure the metadata is updated.  Also,
you were running (as I recall) on a low-end Sun, which typically has
lots of disk bandwidth but relatively little CPU power compared to
most Intel boxes.  In that situation, Mailscanner makes more sense.

> Btw: thank you for not squelching this topic.  When I tried to have a
> similar discussion on the MailScanner list, about a year ago, the
> maintainer pretty much banned the topic from discussion (even though I
> was, at the time, advocating the mixed approach and not an approach of
> "abandoning MailScanner").  It has left a lasting bad impression for me.

Really?  I've worked with Julian on MIME-Tools issues and he seemed
pretty pleasant and reasonable to me.  (Both MIMEDefang and Mailscanner
use MIME-Tools.)

Regards,

David.