Sometimes I get asked on what is my MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) of choice. Almost always I am asking “What do you want to do with it?”. Personally, in most places I install sendmail. There are cases (cases where one would use FEATURE(nullclient) or similar) where I install nullmailer, for I find it unnecessary to run sendmail.

People sometimes ask me why do I choose sendmail and not Postfix (or Qmail in the old days) or even Exim since we are running a mostly Debian shop. Leaving the monolithic argument aside (which is kind of funny when most people that use it are using a monolithic kernel OS anyway) I am using sendmail because of its expressive power. I can find a way to express what I am thinking (filtering, routing, etc) in its modem noise of a programming language or milters like MIMEDefang (IIRC, there’s a wonderful PDF presentation by Ricudis on the Turing completeness of the sendmail.cf language but I have no link to it).

It is not that I have not used other MTAs. Hell, I was even running Postfix alpha versions right after it was renamed from VMailer. And occasionally I am running MeTA1 instances. But I always return to sendmail. If it does not suit you, it is OK. Pick the one MTA that can help you build the setup that you have in mind, be it Exim, Postfix, netqmail, commercial software like Exchange or CommuniGate, whatever. If it works for you and your team, then it is the right choice. Endless debates are for people who have too much free time.

However, if there is one recommendation that I can share, this is it: If you are serious about email (routing) invest some time reading the bat book. He who can understand a complex piece of software like sendmail, can guide himself through any email system.

(triggered by a brief conversation I had with a friend this afternoon)

This post is about a neat trick that I have not seen many times discussed. According to the configuration README the default values for controlling load averages are:

• confQUEUE_LA (QueueLA) Load average at which queue-only function kicks in. Default values is (8 * numproc) where numproc is the number of processors online (if that can be determined).
• confREFUSE_LA (RefuseLA) Load average at which incoming SMTP connections are refused. Default values is (12 * numproc) where numproc is the number of processors online (if that can be determined).

However in “Sendmail Theory and Practice” (I am a proud owner of both editions) Paul Vixie and Fred Avolio propose a different approach:

“Astute readers will note that the value shown for Ox (QueueLA) is larger than the value shown for OX (RefuseLA), and that this is opposite from the configuration files you may have seen elsewhere. Setting them as shown here gives Sendmail a range of load average in which it is capable of delivering messages from its queue but incapable of receiving new messages. This is intentional. If you set Ox to be less than OX, Sendemail has instead a range of load average in which it can receive new mail (thus adding to the queue) but cannot deliver any queued mail. We believe that mail queues should become smaller or stay the same size when the load average is high. After watching our large mail gateway computers melt down many times over the years, we have learned that it is better to let other hosts’ mail stay where it was -on other hosts- when our load average is high, than to accept it even though we don’t plan to do anything with it until load average becomes low again.”

In other words although the defaults suggest otherwise, it may be wiser to have QueueLA > RefuseLA. This piece of advice is on both the 1995 (1st) and 2002 (2nd) editions of the book. A pearl that comes from 1995 that is still relevant.