Upgrading Evolution/Express/Mac-equivalent

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On 22/07/09 01:28 PM, Piper wrote:
> Why wouldn't Evolution or Express be improved or upgraded? And what does the 
> Mac OS call its emailer?
> 
> So these are three email servers allowed by Shaw and other ISPs.


Herein lies the crux of the matter. Evolution, Outlook Express, KMail,
Outlook, Mail.app on OSX, Thunderbird, Eudora, Pine, Mutt, they all
perform the same task when it comes to email. They're MUAs (Mail User
Agents) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_User_Agent>. They're NOT
email servers.

Postfix, Qmail, Sendmail, they're mail servers, or MTA (Message Transfer
Agents) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_transfer_agent>.

Mailman, Sympa, Majordomo, ezmlm are list servers
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list>.

To put this in the simplest terms possible, you create a message
addressed to the address of the list server in your MUA. When you hit
"Send", it hands the message off to the MTA, which could be your ISP's
or yours. The SMTP protocol works out how that message will reach its
final destination. The message might be relayed (like a bucket brigade
passing your message along) to the ultimate destination, the machine on
which the MTA for the domain hosting the list server resides. The MTA
accepts your message for delivery and hands off the message to the list
server, which checks to make sure you're a subscriber and that the
message doesn't violate any of the other configuration options of the
list, such as message size (people have been known to send ISO images as
email attachments to a list server). The list server takes your message
and creates a new message addressed to each subscriber of the list
server and hands of those messages to the MTA to deliver to the
addressee. If the list has 10,000 subscribers, that one message from you
will cause the list server to send 10,000 messages, one for each
subscriber. It is virtually impossible for a subscriber base of that
size to not have some of those bounce with either hard or soft failures.
Who gets the bounces? Not you, the sender of the original message. (Can
you imagine what a mess that would be if you got hundreds of bounces
every time you posted something to a sizable list?) The list server,
being the originator of the message, gets the bounces. Mailman has
mechanisms for dealing with them, up to and including setting
subscribers to NOMAIL if they bounce too often.

By the way, Shaw doesn't "allow" those MUAs. They will only provide
support for three (according to you) but you can use whatever MUA you like.


> If they are improved Shaw won't allow them? Is that political?


There is nothing to "improve". You're trying to turn an MUA into an
all-in-one MTA and list server. Not only will it never happen, if by
some miracle it did, Shaw wouldn't allow them because they would be
*servers* then and that apparently violates their TOS. Is that
political? Not in the sense you ask the question but I think it is on
some level because the big oligopolist media companies posing as ISPs
want us to be obedient little *consumers* of "content", not content
providers. That we might become content providers ourselves threatens
their creaky business models.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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