On Sun, 9 Nov 1997, Tim Ferrell wrote: > > there's also the 'minor' problem that only a few MUAs (i don't know of > > one except for qmail-popper) will work with qmail's new maildir format. > > > > Actually this is not entirely true... You can set up qmail to use mbox > files - but as you point out, the author strongly discourages this. NFS > issues aside, I do not care much for maildir.
yes, the debian qmail package in experimental/ even uses them by default. only problem is that a user's main mailbox file is in the WRONG place, in ~/Mailbox rather than /var/spool/mail/<username> where it belongs. I still don't know of any MUAs which will read mail from either maildir or ~/Mailbox. admittedly, configuring pine or elm to read ~/Mailbox rather than the usual spool dir is pretty simple....but that requires every user on the system to reconfigure their mail client. > > but the biggest problem with qmail is the author's attitude. > > The sad thing is that it is often difficult for most people to separate > genuine issues from personal crusades... i see the author's attitude as being a genuine issue - his arrogance prevents him from being able to produce software which can be used by people with conflicting (and equally valid) ideas about how the mail system should work. I prefer to use software written by authors who are responsive to user's needs. > > finally, qmail is non-free. debian CAN'T use it as the default MTA. > > Why is it non-free? because you can't distribute modified source, modified binaries, or even pre-compiled binaries without special approval from the author. price is probably the least important factor in what makes a program free - the freedom is in freedom to modify and distribute, not in zero cost. > Anyhow, I will stick with sendmail, despite its complexity - it is a > known quantity and does what *I* like... ;-) me too. i look at other MTAs from time to time, just to keep up with alternative ways of doing things, but i haven't yet found a compelling reason to switch away from sendmail. vmail sounds like it will be good when it's released, but that was still in the design stage last time i looked at the vmail web pages (a few months ago...i'll dig up the url if you're interested). personally, i think that sendmail is actually simpler to configure than smail or exim....or more precisely, debian's sendmailconfig script can configure a system which will meet the needs of <wild guess> 99% </wild guess> users. run sendmailconfig, answer a few questions, and you end up with a sendmail.cf file which works. if you need something more complex, you can either edit /etc/mail/sendmail.mc or /etc/sendmail.cf directly. i know that debian's smail has a similar config script - i used to run smail a few years ago, before i switched to sendmail - and it's very useful too. I just find the million-and-one directories and files a lot more confusing than a single .mc or .cf file. sendmail also happens to be the best documented MTA around - there's at least 2 or 3 good books devoted to sendmail. this was one of the reason i finally gave up on smail - i couldn't find any books on smail anywhere (the bat book isn't what i'd consider light reading but at least it exists). craig -- craig sanders networking consultant Available for casual or contract temporary autonomous zone system administration tasks. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
