Hello Les,
But you are missing the point that once something has been done
for sendmail via the included m4 macros, no one else ever has
to understand it again. You just edit a line in the .mc file
to activate the feature/option following the comments in the
file or some documentation and the right thing happens. As
shipped in Centos you can do pretty much anything you would
want a mailer to do by changing a few lines in sendmail.mc.
Actually, what I want to get at is if you need anything beyond the
rulesets that are provided, you cannot do anything unless you understand
sendmail rulesets and that is the same if you need to change something
too.
It doesn't make any more sense to talk about the difficulty
of understanding sendmail.cf than it does to talk about
source code changes. It is nice that both are available for
those who might want to tackle changes at that level but it
is not necessary for ordinary use.
I guess that is the whole point. Ordinary users will probably have no
clue how sendmail works and when problems arise, good luck trying to fix
or get around them. So unless they know how to build other stuff and use
procmail or maildrop, they are pretty much stuck to system mailboxes.
Then when you add MimeDefang, you also get the ability to
add in any other operations you want to happen in parallel
with the smtp chat and control it all with a bit of perl.
Which makes it no different from your dissing of qmail. qmail provides
very little that you can do before DATA in the smtp chat and mimedefang
does not kick in until after SMTP DATA in sendmail and they are
therefore the same.
As for mimedefang, qmail lets you do anything that can be described in
perl, shell, C, python, whatever you fancy in fact and reject at the
smtp level too since you can replace qmail-queue or put a filter before
qmail-queue.
Another way of saying that is that qmail is so bad you have to
completely replace components to make it usable at all.
Which is no different from sendmail + mimedefang. You have no idea how
qmail works so I shall ignore your ignorance on this. sendmail gave you
milter so that you can get at the headers and message body. DJB's
multiple program approach to separate the different functions
automatically provides you the ability to get at what you want by either
modifying that particular qmail program or by replacing like qpsmtpd or
by adding another program like qmail-qfilter. For this same reason,
people don't get any trouble from postfix and qmail with regard to
security issues and sendmail X following the same design principles says
a lot.
I am sorry, but one can get the functionalily of sendmail sans the
neverending list of security updates and that is on two other mta software.
Sendmail is probably the most heavily audited code available
today, and none of the other MTA+addons are as well integrated
or designed for efficiency as sendmail+MimeDefang with its
multiplexed pool of backend slaves. Qpsmtpd is promising but
the project is still in the process of reinventing things
MimeDefang has had down for years.
yeah, sendmail is probably the most heavily audited code and people
still find issues just exim also had/has issues due to their monolithic
design. Ever wonder why sendmail X is following the footsteps of qmail
and postfix, two mtas that were written by two security different experts?
Multiplexed pool of backend slave? sendmail + mysql anyone?
Let's see, postfix supports mysql, ldap and postgresql out of the box.
qmail's design allows people to add mysql/postgresql/ldap support such
that we have qmail-ldap and qmail-sql. So you can use qmail-ldap or
qmail-sql instead of doing your own. exim also comes with mysql, ldap
support out of the box.
methinks it is sendmail that is behind here regarding backend slaves.
You need to add mysql table support and then you have to write the
rulesets to be able to use those tables.
Well integrated and designed for efficiency eh? I'd like to see
benchmarks between sendmail + mimedefang versus postfix + amavisd. In
fact, I'd like to see sendmail + mimedefang integrated with a mysql
backend versus postfix + amavisd integrated with a mysql backend. But
the whole thing would be unfair since postfix does connection pooling to
its backends while sendmail will probably beat the crap out of its
backend if it supported any sql database at all.
You can diss all other mtas + their addons all you like Les, but
sendmail X is following the design principles of qmail and postfix which
says something.
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