Your message dated: Thu, 08 May 1997 21:49:01 +0200
> > In fact, in the system we are writing from the ground up, that's
> >where the bulk of the work is anyway. The part of handling the SMTP
> >dialog on non-forking servers, etc... is largely done.
>
> Brad, at some point you're going to have to decide whether you're in
> operations and can't speak about development issues, or you're in
> development all right.
I'm in operations myself, but we work reasonably closely with
development, and I'm aware of where the bulk of their work is
being done.
> This statement is one that I would expect from the
> development manager in charge of deciding how your new mail service is
> going to be developed, after having reviewed the potential benefits of
> using (among other bidders) LSMTP as an API-driven SMTP engine.
We haven't looked at LSMTP in particular, but none of the
commercial or freely available products (PMDF included) we've looked
at have had enough going for them that it was worth trying to graft
onto them the ability to gateway mail into the AOL mail system.
And we've looked at quite a few. By the time you rip out all
the things you don't need, and add in the things you do, there's
not much left of what you started with. Under those circumstances,
you might as well write your own from the ground up. That's what
we're doing, that's what CompuServe is doing.
> Incidentally, you are going to have to be a lot more convincing if you
> want me to believe that "hooks to filter out the mail AOL doesn't want to
> get" is the bulk of the development work for AOL's new ground-breaking
> mail system, and everything else is puny and trivial.
It's not puny or trivial, but it's work that is largely already
done, and is based on the simplified task of only accepting mail
(not sending it), while the performance aspect is addressed by
other large-scale work we have done where systems have to be made
extremely efficient and handle several orders of magnitude more
load than they were originally conceived of as possibly handling.
The hard part is all the work that's necessary to teach it how to
deliver mail into the AOL mail system, and the work that's necessary
to teach it how to recognize and refuse to accept various types of
messages based on a multitude of pieces of input information.
> You keep telling us that you are having a problem that
> threatens the very existence of AOL's delivery service, well, if that's
> true I certainly wouldn't use the word "no-op" to refer to a potential
> solution to this problem, even if it is a temporary one!
And these are problems we can solve with our existing systems.
I don't see where grafting LSMTP onto the front end buys us anything.
--
Brad Knowles MIME/PGP: [log in to unmask]
Senior Unix Administrator <http://www.his.com/~brad/>
<http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE38CCEF1>
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