> This is something I have been wrestling with -- sendmail or qmail.
 > Sendmail is highly esoteric from a non-programmer's point of view,
 > and I would most likely need to hire someone smart enough to configure
 > it correctly (Security!). What are the benefits of using qmail in
 > its place? (security?)

Qmail was written with security as one principal goal.  Performance is
the other major one.  It's a little quirky to install, but once in
place it largely takes care of itself.  (Don't use the Debian package:
build from source.  I had problems with the starting scripts in the
Debian package.)  The only compatibility issue I've found with qmail
is that it adds a Delivered-to: header to mail during local delivery.
This can survive LISTSERV handling outbound to a list editor or
moderator.  If the editor's mail package also leaves it intact, the
message will bounce on its way to be posted.  I can supply a simple
(amounts to commenting out one line) patch to disable this feature.

Sendmail is usually best approached by keeping current in versions
(fairly frequent releases), and using the M4-based configuration setup.
You don't really have to tackle sendmail.cf barehanded.  Sendmail is
known to have performance problems with large volume, at least in
earlier versions.  From reading this list, it seems that some larger
LISTSERV shops manage to get it to work by serious tuning.

 > a) we need to transition to Linux
 > Him: Why? Isn't NT working already?
 >
 > b) we need to pay a fee to convert our license with L-Soft
 > Him: (see above) *look of bewilderment*

Not sure I call frequent crashes and resource crises "working." :-)

Sounds like fixing (a) mostly fixes both.  In that line, here are
the reboot entries from my "last" logs:

reboot   system boot  2.2.14           Thu Apr 27 22:43
reboot   system boot  2.2.12           Fri Feb 25 17:14
reboot   system boot  2.2.12           Fri Dec 24 11:13

The reboots in February and April were both done to make changes to
the running kernel (new version in April, module build in February).
December is long enough ago I don't remember why it happened.

Other Linux servers here have been up 73, 63, 125, 113, 54,
61 and 61 days.  Some of those two month old reboots were due to
installation of UPSes.  This kind of reliability from Linux is pretty
well documented on the net, kicks the tar out of 4-day reboots of NT,
and might help you convince your president.  If that doesn't work,
let him carry your pager for a few days.

Another beauty of Linux is nearly all the software you're
likely to need (other than LISTSERV) is free of licensing costs,
as vs. Microsoft, while the hardware is pretty much the same.
Furthermore, Linux tends to be a lot less demanding of resources
than NT.  (Boot NT in 8 MB...)  If your load is fairly small, you
might even manage to recycle a PC from somewhere and get by with it.
If you have to buy something, you can buy somewhat smaller.

I'm inclined to believe that it's easier to build little handy tools
for working with the beast under unix than NT.  For example, I have
short C programs which dump out the LISTSERV .list files in text
format for editing and then put them back, scripts to scan files
looking for e-mail addresses, various kinds of monitoring scripts, etc.

Hope this helps some.

Dennis