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- matthiasgoodman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10I think it shows the BSD attitude is to use the best tools, not shoe horn poor tools into the system.
- jzimmerman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7"Sendmail will remain available from pkgsrc"
You can choose to compile it yourself. The choice is still there. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I was actually just trying to flame to get the comments rolling in...
- tghz123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Here we go again....Postfix zealots bashing sendmail....because Postfix is sooo easy...yea right
Try running the following config in Postfix and see how easy it is:
TLS with SMTPAUTH
Blacklisting
Greylisting
Whitelisting
Local Blacklist
Virus Checking (Clamav)
SPAM Assassin
..sendmail may be a bit cryptic but with the milter interface all the above is
easily doable and it works great. - joelhardi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5You can still choose to use sendmail if you want, they aren't removing it entirely from the ports tree. They're just dropping it as the default mailer.
Currently, if you want to use something like postfix instead of sendmail as your default mailer, you just have to install it and then make a few configuration changes. At least in FreeBSD that's what you do. Now it'll just be the other way around in NetBSD.
Most Linux distros seem to use postfix as their default, except for maybe Redhat ES and a few other "enterprise" distros. IMHO, postfix is a safer, more sensible default for people who just need mail-sending ability on their utility boxes. Real mail server admins and other power users will continue to install qmail or whatever their MTA of choice is anyway. - mellon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I'm running Ubuntu on my server, and the mailer is postfix. Do other distros still come with sendmail? Seems like a reason not to run them - I've been running mail servers for a really long time, and had a lot of sendmail pain as a consequence - to me this just seems like the obvious right thing. The problem with sendmail is not the exploits - it's that it's a horrible pain in the neck to configure, and virtually impossible to configure for proper spam filtering because of the way sendmail rulesets work. Yuck.
Postfix isn't exactly a panacea, but it's not bad. - jzimmerman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@Urasai
Actually the Unix attitude towards tools is for a program to do one thing and do that one thing well. So if you write a program that does one thing extremely well it is highly likely that it won't need to change much over the course of 25 years you guys are complaining about.
If your program stops doing one thing well or needs to do something different, the answer is pretty simple. Use a different program or write your own that does the one thing that you need well.
Most *nix command line tools are like this. (i.e. ls, rm, cp, grep, etc., etc.) - grendelboogie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Exim's not bad either.
- chrysalis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Ok, sendmail hasn't a wonderful security record, although I've yet to see real exploits for the flaws discovered in the last years.
But at least, sendmail is free, with a real BSD license. Don't tell me that postfix is free, it's not, check out why OpenBSD doesn't ship it on cdroms (section 4 of the license).
And Sendmail *works*. I'm not telling that other mailers don't, I also use Zmailer, Postfix and Qmail. And I never hit any odd bug with these mailers. No mail was lost, no mail was delivered to the wrong recipient unless I did something wrong in the configuration.
Just like other MTAs, Sendmail perfectly does its job. I have many servers running Sendmail in the default OpenBSD configuration. They were started once, and I didn't do anything to keep them running. Zero maintenance, I just keep the system up to date. And everything works fine, mails get properly delivered.
So why say that Sendmail sucks? It works, it does exactly what it is supposed to do and once it has been set up, it's extremely reliable.
There's absoluty no reason to bash it. While other mailers don't need m4 to generate their configuration file, I see *no* reason to switch from a working sendmail installation to another mailer. - Night, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2As far as I can tell it is being removed from the core system. As I see it it will now be tracked as its own program in the ports tree. (Someone correct me I'm a n00b to BSD, interested but still learning) So its not that its removed its just if you want it you have to manually get it, so your complaint about Linux vs BSD is inaccurate because how it stands in Linux you have to manually get it anyways. (Yes many distro's will have it built in.)
- slippery, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Postfix is more secure and far easier to maintain. Exim is also good. I'm not sure why people cling to Sendmail when their life could be easier by switching to another MTA.
- bassintro, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Sendmail does have a horrible track record, postfix is much more stable and secure anyway. However NetBSD is all about being flexible and working on any platform, shouldn't people have the right to choose?
- infonography, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Good Riddance to bad rubbish, never met a sendmail install that was worth a damn. Postfix is much better. Sendmail on Solaris is simply frightful.
- bdawg923, on 11/07/2007, -0/+1I think I must have seen this story at least 3 times. :|
- kabewm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have all of those features. I use QmailToaster, now that's ez!
It does all that and more (blocking by extension such as .mp3, Allows delegation of control per domain, SPF, DomainKeys, mailing lists, webmail, vacation auto responding, web based password changes for users, etc.)
http://www.qmailtoaster.com/
* DISCLAIMER: I am also a small contributor to the QmailToaster Project. - r3tex, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Finally!! So nice of them to remove it! Base system should be devoid of crap like Perl and Sendmail. Good step in the right direction.
- samdu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've actually never used Sendmail. The configuration is just too much of a pain. I've been using Postfix since I started running my own mail server serveral years ago and have never had a problem and the configuration is something approaching regular english.
- monergism, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Sendmail is dated. It uses a very odd config file and is not intuitive. While the documentation is decent, there are other packages that allow for a much more secure and documented solution.
I don't know why this is news. Did you know Microsoft replaced regsrv32 with Regedit? This was done a while ago. No on cares except the *nix fan boys and they can't even give a good reason to care. - clsgis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Avoid Qmail. Its bugs aren't getting fixed. It's an uncoordinated heap of unmaintained patches, that break each other.
There are two killer bugs.
1. Qmail does not test for deliverability until after it has accepted the message into its queue. So it can't 553 against a spammer's dictionary attack. Instead, it pummels some innocent victim that the spammer happened to choose for his envelope-sender. This generates so much backscatter that you will get blocked by AOL and other large domains.
2. Qmail does not combine deliveries to more than one RCPT at the same domain. If you have 100 Yahoo.com subscribers on a Mailman list, Qmail will conduct a hundred separate SMTP dialogs to deliver one message. Yahoo and Hotmail will block you for that. A well written and maintained MTA will connect once and do 100 RCPT TOs.
There are unconfirmed aftermarket patches for both problems, but they perform extensive rewrites. It's not Qmail any more when they're done. And you have no way of knowing whether the patch you chose for bug #1 will break whatever the patch for #2 wants to do. Most of the patches at Qmail.org are abandoned and unmaintained.
I thought "Qmail rocks" when I installed it in '98. Things change. - dharm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"This just goes to show the BSD attitude if you can't fix it, remove it."
linux shares the same idea somewhat... if you cant fix it/need it remove it, if we need it later, we will just redo it - Herolint, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1They do have a choice.
I also have to say it's about time! I hope FreeBSD and OpenBSD follow suit. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Qmail rocks, though Postfix comes a close second.
--
Sharjeel
http://www.sharjeel.net - tghz123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0bbqribs -
Gimme a break...look at your own Postfix Wikis...documented...yes...
Works great? Please...if you want a myriad of other processes running to do the job...
Not to mention the stupid queue handling on Postfix. I'm not saying Sendmail is
the answer for everyone either, but Postfix is not the panacea you make it out to be. - bbqribs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Uh, actually those things are VERY easy to do with postfix and very well documented. You're talking out of your ass. There are a couple 'milter' ways to do it. amavisd-new, mailscanner both work great with Postfix too.
Greylisting is also included with Postfix.
Don't spout off clueless *****. - riz94107, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0And, of course, keeping in mind that this is merely the DEFAULT mailer and pkgsrc still has many to choose from. Heck, you could even run qmail. I hear some people actually LIKE that. Postfix has been part of NetBSD since 1.5 - now it's just the default, or rather will be for 4.0.
- dobesov, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2Yeah.. its the Unix attitude... thats why Linux is still overly complicated, cryptic and cannot even standardise things like configuration files. HooRah for modern day rippoffs of 1970s software!
- grendelboogie, on 10/12/2007, -8/+222 hours and no comments? Sendmail has fallen mightily.
- Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3I thought the BSD attitude was to use ancient tools designed in the 1970s and use them religiously as if there had been no progress in the last 25 years. Maybe that's just the UNIX attitude.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1LOLLERSKATES
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -17/+2This just goes to show the BSD attitude if you can't fix it, remove it.
It's a shame really, that's why I use Linux.
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