On Sun, Jun 30, 2002 at 11:54:58PM -0400, Theo Van Dinter wrote: | On Sun, Jun 30, 2002 at 10:52:53PM -0500, Derrick 'dman' Hudson wrote: | > Why do these "prebuilt" systems all use sendmail? I've heard enough | | sendmail is the godfather of email on the Internet? ;)
The PDP-7 is the godfather of UNIX. Why don't I have one on my desk? :-) | it's scalable, It certainly is flexible with a Turing-complete configuration language. However, I don't need Turing completeness to configure an MTA. I _do_ need that in a general purpose programming langauge, though. I recognize the historical reasons for that design decision, and I believe it was the correct choice _at the time_, but now it is just extra complexity that isn't necessary and provides no real benefit. | reliable, sendmail is, I think, the MTA with the most security holes (in its lifetime). At least, I have heard of a great many holes in sendmail, but not nearly as many in exim, postifx or qmail. | and currently handles the majority of all Internet email traffic? I wonder how much of that is due to chicken vs. egg. If RH ships sendmail, and linuxconf handles the most typical setups, who would use anything else? If these "internet appliance" boxes ship with sendmail, who is going to install a different MTA on it? | > horror stories about sendmail's config file(s) to stay away from it | > myself. exim is really easy to configure. If you want to work with | | Well, if you screw around with the sendmail config file, you're not | doing it right. You should be doing the much easier thing which is m4 | configurations that generate the configuration. (ie: treat sendmail's | configuration as a binary and don't edit it directly...) What if the thing you want to do hasn't already been coded up in a pre-packaged M4 macro? What if the existing macros are close, but not quite what you need? What then? Since I haven't actually tried to muck with sendmail I don't know if this is just a strawman or if these scenarios are common. They certainly sound common on this list. | It makes the vast majority of configurations simple while still allowing | the more advanced people to tweak pretty much everything they'd want | to. :) exim makes the majority of configuration simple, while still allowing the more advanced people to simply (pun intended) tweak pretty much everything they'd want to. :-). (I also consider postfix a worthy MTA, though it lacks a couple of features exim has) -D -- (A)bort, (R)etry, (T)ake down entire network? http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/
msg06901/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
