topdrop-0.1 README


1. What is topdrop?

Topdrop is a so called MDA (aka Mail Delivery Agent). You can use this program
together with sendmail or any other MTA which supports stand-alone MDA's and
listens to MDA return values according to those of sendmail. In this initial
release it is not possible to deliver mail in any other format than the
maildir standard (created by djb, see man 5 maildir on qmail systems). You
don't want to have anything else than maildir anyway :)


2. How to install it?

To install this program you have to have a reasonable knowledge of how your
MTA works. I only tested it on linux and sendmail 8.10+. 
Sendmail uses (as you may already know) m4 macro's to generate a sendmail.cf
file, which is the general configuration of sendmail. In the directory 'm4'
you can find 2 .m4 macro files and a sample config.m4 which can be used to 
generate a sendmail.cf with, which supports delivery with topdrop.
Worth knowing: I stole the procmail m4's in the sendmail source tree directory
and modified them to create a topdrop configuration >:)
Anyway, just run make && make install (as root) and the created binary will be
installed in /usr/local/bin. If you get any compiling errors, just send a mail
and I'll try to debug it ;)
In the config.h you can change some settings like using procmail if possible
as a delivery agent, or use syslogging. There's some other stuff in it too.
Just read the config.h file if you want to know what does what.


3. Features

Currently it doesn't support a lot of features. That's what makes it a small
little (fast) delivery agent, which does what it is supposed to. I'll add some
features to it when I have time for it.
General overview of features:
* maildir delivery;
* option to use procmail delivery when a .procmailrc exists in ~user;
* automatic creation of maildirs;
* logging via syslog;
* returning of non-critical return values when deliveries fail.


4. Feature request

You can mail me some feature requests if you like, or add them yourself if
you're one of those 3117 h4x0rs :)


5. Feedback and bugreport

I'd like to know what you think of this program. Just send me an email about
how great (*blink*) this thing is or how badly it sucks :)
If you happen to find any bugs (except for non-linux systems), I would like to
know that as well. My goal is to create a nice safe mail delivery agent, and
you are probably the one who can help me with that. 


6. Why is this thing called topdrop?

Since I'm not very creative in making up names, I just gave it this name.
(FYI: before this release it was called "delivery")



Created: October 17th 2000

Johan Mulder
Email: jmulder@localhost.nl