Subject: Re: Plausibility of sendmail?
From: Brian Dessent <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2004 07:44:54 -0800

[email-masked] wrote:

> >> If someone is crazy enough to want a production mailserver with Cygwin,
> >> let them run Exim.
> 
> Point well taken. Having limited experience with mail servers in general, I
> will certainly keep your advice filed away in the ole noodle for future
> reference. Of course a lot of reasons that *crap* persists is because
> there's a lot of folks who are familiar with and experienced with such
> *crap*. For someone under the gun to come up with a quick fix, inevitably
> they will attempt to implement the familiar. If sendmail REALLY deserves to
> die, then keeping it out of the Cygwin distribution is something I would
> understand, and probably support (as long as there are advertised
> alternatives of course!)

Well, I don't see sendmail dying anytime soon.  It's still running on
something like half of all mail servers, and I'm pretty sure it's still
the #1 MTA.  But, it's decades old and has reams and reams of security
bulletins, both past and present (and future!)  Security was just not
such a concern back before The Internet existed, when ARPAnet and this
new TCP/IP thing were all the rage.

It's configured with a "sendmail.cf" file that closely resembles line
noise and is so byzantine that it takes a 1232 page O'Reilly book to
explain it.  It's rumoured that some sendmail developers don't even
understand parts of the file.  The recommended advise is to never touch
it, but instead edit the more friendly .mc file which is passed through
a number of m4 macros to generate the .cf file.

It sticks around due to legacy, as far as I can tell.  It "just works"
at a number of places and nobody wants to be the person to rip it all
out and install something else.  It also has support for some really
anachronistic features (e.g. UUCP) that you likely won't find
elsewhere.  It's probably got the worst performance of the "big four",
but it can be made to do most of the things that you would ever want out
of an MTA, and since it's so old everything's at least documented pretty
well.

So, if you use Webmin to configure it, and you stay up to date with your
patches, and you aren't trying to run a whole enterprise's mail on a
Pentium then it will probably work fine.  I suppose it would be unfair
to call it crap, and you will always be able to find those who defend it
with the same level of fanaticism as a heated vi-vs-emacs argument.  And
to swing this back on-topic, I personally don't think it should be
propagated to new places where it has yet to exist, such as Cygwin,
especially when viable alternatives already exist there.

Brian

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