speeding up bogofiltering

[Trevor Smith]

On December 1, 2004 11:25 am, Tom Anderson wrote:
> I keep hearing this, but I don't see it.  Sendmail works right out of the
> box in most cases.

Not for me. To reiterate though, I'm saying sendmail won't *send* on my 
system, only receive.

To make it send, the config file must be modified and then it must be run 
through m4 and then sendmail must be restarted (as far as I have been able to 
understand). It may have turned out that only two items needed to be changed 
in the sendmail.mc config file to make sendmail "work" on my system, but the 
"simplest" howto I could find contained nearly 2,700 words before it got to 
the point of teaching me that all I needed to change was those two things and 
it never actually said that all I needed to change was those two things, I 
just sort of figured that out. And that was *after* I jumped directly to the 
part of the howto for "the home user". (The howto also contained typos or 
something that caused its sample config file not to compile properly, thus 
stopping sendmail from even restarting, which didn't help the learning 
curve.)

Without these modifications, all my outgoing messages disappear. No error, no 
bounces, no warnings. I don't know if sendmail is failing, throwing them away 
on purpose (according to what it thinks I was instructing) or if external 
servers are discarding my messages because I have sendmail misconfigured. If 
I hadn't been sending to myself (and occasionally I wasn't), I would never 
have known the messages weren't being sent normally (and occasionally I 
didn't).

>  Updating sendmail.mc is well-documented, as are the
>  other files such as virtusertable. 

Yes, the documentation is extensive.

>  It's all pretty intuitive as far as I  

I disagree completely and I'd wager I'm provably right, according to the 
definition of "intuitive". For a person who *already* knows how to configure 
sendmail or who has an advanced degree in networking, of course the docs may 
seem clear. However, that is not "intuition", it's prior knowledge. To the 
casual user, the options are very numerous and the explanations of them are 
opaque. I would happily wager $100 that given any 100 truly randomly chosen 
individuals -- even people who have used computers for a few years -- over 90 
of them would be unable to explain or understand what the options in the 
sendmail documentation are for.

For the record, I'm a computer science student, (currently taking a networking 
course!) about to become a masters of computer science student, and I found 
the documentation unilluminating.

-- 
Trevor Smith // trevor at haligonian.com