Sendmail replacements?

Thu Feb 13 12:11:46 PST 2003

A couple of comments and random thoughts about qmail, postfix and mailers.

 - architecturally they are different!

   qmail has a master program which starts children who inherit their
   operating environment (and some control parameters) from the parent.  
   This is part of the design.

   postfix is a gaggle of daemons who communicate parameters via pipes.
   They do not inherit control characteristics from their parent.
   The daemons are also suspicious of what they are passed and "validate"  
   all input.  This is part of the design.

 - the way they are written is different!

   D. J. Bernstein (qmail's primary author) treats whitespace and comments
   as a non-renewable resource!  Much of his code would not be out of place
   as a submission to the IOCCC.  If you need to debug a code problem or
   want to add a feature then you'll likely end up spending considerable
   time doing it.

   Wietse Zweitze Venema (Postfix's primary author) writes code which is
   legible, and with insightful comments.  You'll spend less time debugging
   a code problem or trying to add a feature.

 - All of the (major) "religious war" mailers were written either by
   academics, professionals with a strong academia background or
   students.

 - None of exim, postfix or qmail were written by a student who was an
   undergraduate or graduate at the time!  Consequently none of the programs
   get my labeling as:  "graduate code" or "undergraduate code".
   (Both sendmail and bind qualify!)

Having said these things, all of Exim, Postfix and qmail get the job done.

I run postfix.

Simon.

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Rich Holland wrote:

> [Approved despite the HTML.  Sigh.   -- postmaster at baylisa.org]
> 
> It's been several years since I did any significant SMTP work, and now I
> find that I've got to configure a bunch of machines and a central hub to
> relay mail for the others.  My first thought was rewriting headers by
> changing the sendmail.cf file, but now that I think about it, this may
> be the time to replace sendmail with something "easier" or "better" or
> "more secure" but I'm out of touch with the state of the art in SMTP
> mailers.
> 
>  
> 
> Anyone have any suggestions?
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks!
> Rich
> 
> 