Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 23:56:13 -0600 From: Christopher Farley <chris@northernbrewer.com> To: Fenix <fenix@xs4some.net> Cc: freebsd-security@freebsd.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: sendmail vs. postfix question Message-ID: <20010131235613.A7019@northernbrewer.com> In-Reply-To: <01020104192002.01203@xs4some.net>; from fenix@xs4some.net on Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 04:19:20AM %2B0100 References: <01020104192002.01203@xs4some.net>
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Fenix (fenix@xs4some.net) wrote: > I have a little question about sendmail vs. postfix .... > Are there any known recent problms with sendmail security ? > what about postfix ? Sendmail is a large, monolithic, complicated program that runs as root. Historically, it has been responsible for some of the most notorious and widespread security holes on the Internet, but I don't believe there are any (known) gaping holes in it today. Sendmail configuration is complicated and arcane -- it is the subject of one of the thickest books in the O'Reilly catalog. Actually, configuring sendmail is not that bad once you understand it -- you edit a human-readable config file which is processed by the m4 macro processor to build the much less human-readable sendmail.cf file. However, if you are like I am, and infrequently make configuration changes to your mail server, it may take more than a few minutes of grepping documentation to make even a tiny change. Postfix has a different architecture, but strictly conforms to the 'sendmail api'. That is to say that Postfix is more or less designed to be a drop-in replacement for Sendmail. Postfix is actually several small, specialized daemons that do not run as root (!), which has some positive security implications. Configuration of Postfix is very easy; there is no m4 macro processing here! I have always been able to make it do what I need it to do, although my needs aren't very great. According to my ISP (visi.com), Postfix outperforms Sendmail. -- Christopher Farley www.northernbrewer.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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