1.1 --- a/thesis/tex/1-Introduction.tex	Fri Nov 14 18:13:14 2008 +0100
     1.2 +++ b/thesis/tex/1-Introduction.tex	Fri Nov 14 18:16:26 2008 +0100
     1.3 @@ -1,7 +1,13 @@
     1.4  \chapter{Introduction}
     1.5  \label{chap:introduction}
     1.6  
     1.7 -\section{History of electronic mail}
     1.8 +
     1.9 +
    1.10 +
    1.11 +\section{Transporting mail}
    1.12 +
    1.13 +
    1.14 +\subsection{History of electronic mail}
    1.15  %TODO: have a quote from Bell Labs about email here
    1.16  
    1.17  Electronic mail\index{electronic mail} (short: \name{email})\citeweb{wikipedia:email} is a basic concept in \unix.\citeweb{unix-mail-intro} On \unix\ machines, a lot of information is distributed by \name{system mail}, which is email sent by the operating system. Beside that, email is the common communication system between humans working on computers.
    1.18 @@ -27,9 +33,8 @@
    1.19  More information about the history of electronic mail can be found at: \citeweb{email:griffiths}, \citeweb{email:crocker}, \citeweb{email:vleck}, \citeweb{email:akkad}, \citeweb{email:murakami}, and \citeweb{email:tomlinson}. A good starting point for general information on internet history is \citeweb{wikipedia:historyoftheinternet}.
    1.20  %TODO: check the websites which ones are the important ones; remove unnessesary ones
    1.21  
    1.22 +\subsection{Definition of \MTA}
    1.23  
    1.24 -
    1.25 -\section{Transporting mail}
    1.26  %TODO: when was the term ``mail transfer agent'' established?
    1.27  
    1.28  This thesis is about a \name{mail transfer agent} (or \index{mail transport agent|see{mail transfer agent}}\name{mail transport agent}, short \NAME{MTA}): \masqmail. \sendmail\ is one too---the most important one.
    1.29 @@ -67,7 +72,7 @@
    1.30  
    1.31  
    1.32  
    1.33 -\section{\sendmail}
    1.34 +\subsection{\name{sendmail-compatibility}}
    1.35  \label{sec:sendmail}
    1.36  
    1.37  Allman wrote it to transfer emails between different networks, thus giving \sendmail\ mighty address rewriting abilities. In contrast to its predecessor \name{delivermail}, was \sendmail\ designed to offer greatest flexiblity in configuration; this enabled it to deal with any type of network.
    1.38 @@ -88,3 +93,58 @@
    1.39  \sendmail\ is not only ported to many platforms, even including \name{Microsoft Windows}, but also it is still the prefered \MTA\ on many systems.
    1.40  
    1.41  For deeper knowledge on \sendmail's history, see \cite{costales97} and \cite{vixie01}.
    1.42 +
    1.43 +
    1.44 +
    1.45 +
    1.46 +\section{The \masqmail\ project}
    1.47 +
    1.48 +
    1.49 +\subsubsection{Target field}
    1.50 +Its original author, Oliver Kurth, sees \masqmail\ so:
    1.51 +\begin{quote}
    1.52 +MasqMail is a mail server designed for hosts that do not have a permanent internet connection eg. a home network or a single host at home. It has special support for connections to different ISPs. It replaces sendmail or other MTAs such as qmail or exim.
    1.53 +\end{quote}
    1.54 +
    1.55 +\masqmail\ is inteded to cover a specific niche: non-permanent internet connection and different \NAME{ISP}s.
    1.56 +
    1.57 +Although it can basically replace other \MTA{}s, it is not generally aimed to do so. The package description of \debian\citeweb{packages.debian:masqmail} states this more clearly by changing the last sentence to:
    1.58 +\begin{quote}
    1.59 +In these cases, MasqMail is a slim replacement for full-blown MTAs such as sendmail, exim, qmail or postfix.
    1.60 +\end{quote}
    1.61 +\masqmail\ is a good replacement ``in these cases'', but not generally, since is lacks features essential for running on mail servers. It is primarily not secure enough for being accessable from untrusted locations.
    1.62 +
    1.63 +The program is best used in home networks, which are non-permanently connected to the internet. \masqmail\ sends mail to local destinations, like users on the same machine and on other machines in the local net, immediately. Email to recipients outside the local net are queued when offline and sent when a online connection gets established.
    1.64 +
    1.65 +Further more does \masqmail\ respect online connections through different \NAME{ISP}s; a common thing for dial-up connections. In particular can different sender addresses be set, dependent on the \NAME{ISP} that is used. This prevents mail to be likely classified as spam.
    1.66 +
    1.67 +
    1.68 +
    1.69 +\subsubsection{Typical usage}
    1.70 +This section describes situations that make senseful use of \masqmail.
    1.71 +
    1.72 +A home network consisting of some workstations without a server. The network is connected to the internet by dial-up or broadband. Going online is initiated by computers inside the local net. \NAME{IP} addresses change at least once every day.
    1.73 +
    1.74 +Every workstation would be equiped with \masqmail. Mail transfer within the same machine or within the local net works straight forward. Outgoing mail to the internet is sent, to the concerning \NAME{ISP} for relaying, whenever the router goes online. Receiving of mail from outside needs to be done by a mail fetch program, like the \masqmail\ internal \NAME{POP3} client or \name{fetchmail} for example. The configuration for \masqmail\ would be the same on every computer, except the hostname.
    1.75 +
    1.76 +For the same network but having a server, one could have \masqmail\ running on the server and using simple forwarders (see \ref{subsec:relay-only}) to the server on the workstations. This setup does only support mail transfer to the server, but not back to a workstation; also sending mail to another user on the same workstation is not possible.
    1.77 +
    1.78 +A better setup is to run \masqmail\ on every machine %FIXME
    1.79 +
    1.80 +
    1.81 +
    1.82 +\subsubsection{What makes it special}
    1.83 +
    1.84 +As main advantage, \masqmail\ makes it easy to set up an \MTA\ on workstations or notebooks without the need to do complex configuration or to be an mail server expert.
    1.85 +
    1.86 +Workstations use %FIXME
    1.87 +
    1.88 +
    1.89 +\subsubsection{Alternatives?}
    1.90 +% http://anfi.homeunix.org/sendmail/dialup10.html
    1.91 +
    1.92 +
    1.93 +
    1.94 +\section{Problems to solve}
    1.95 +
    1.96 +