On 6/4/07, Douglas Allan Tutty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 03:28:50PM +0200, Timo Schoeler wrote:
> Thus [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Peter N. M. Hansteen) spake on Mon, 04 Jun 2007
> 15:17:26 +0200:
>
> > Douglas Allan Tutty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> > > However, sendmail is a very steep and tall learning curve. I'm
> > > coming from Debian (which no longer installes with 32 MB ram) so
> > > I'm used to exim. I know that exim is GPL. I'm wondering if there
> > > are other BSD-licensed MTAs.
> >
> > exim is available as a package on OpenBSD as well, so if that's what
> > you are used to, you should feel right at home.
>
> Exim ist GPL, Postfix is 'IBM public license'. Neither is BSD
> compatible.
>
> Honestly, Postfix' license (or my moral on BSD :) convinced me to
> switch back to sendmail... :)
>
I know that exim is in ports. However I wanted some perspective before
I started on sendmail's learning curve. Where possible, I would like to
honour OBSD's philosophy. Also, since sendmail comes with the base
install, I'd have to figure out how to get any other MTA I install to
play with the sendmail that is already there.
If you're after perspective then, I can share the cycle I went
through. I started out hating Sendmail because of the configuration.
It's a beast at first. I first ran qmail instead and then postfix,
because both of them were easier to get set up at first - I didn't
have to go editing through the mc file and the sendmail docs to get
them configured.
Later I ended up moving back to sendmail on OpenBSD because the
default config works for most of my needs. The initial hatred for
Sendmail in my case was a little misplaced; while it's a featureful
MTA with many complex configuration choices, the majority of them are
not needed in the majority of cases. For the cases I do need to change
something, it's easy to do and documented (although in somewhat terse
language) in the sample .mc files or the official docs (or the bat
book, or many other places.) My own ignorance was to blame; once I
invested some time into learning what I needed to know, it came
together.
The other reason most people dislike Sendmail is because of the
(in)security history. I trust the OpenBSD implementation enough to
believe that I'm not extremely likely to get compromised (mine are not
Internet-facing anyway) and if there is an exposure I know there'll be
a patch released quickly.
So in short, sticking with the in-base MTA made more sense to me.
While it's not difficult to replace it with another MTA using
mailer.conf(5)/mailwrapper(8) and such, I like the integration and the
fact that it's ready to go by default.
YMMV.
DS
