Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 23:10:45 -0500 From: Mark Mayo <mark@vmunix.com> To: Yarema <yds@dppl.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sendmail going commercial, and ? Message-ID: <19980319231045.26875@vmunix.com> In-Reply-To: <019101bd5380$00233ab0$1f40e6cd@ichiban.ingress.com>; from Yarema on Thu, Mar 19, 1998 at 04:43:05PM -0500 References: <019101bd5380$00233ab0$1f40e6cd@ichiban.ingress.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Thu, Mar 19, 1998 at 04:43:05PM -0500, Yarema wrote: > >So where do you see us stand: > > > >a. No problem at all, business as usual > >b. We only sustain existing sendmail, and defer replacement until the code > > athrophies enough (via missing new functionality, or just age) > >c. We want to replace sendmail asap, but have a replacement in mind. > >d. We need to start a new MTA project. > >e. Something else which Simon did not think about. > > > The way I see it is send mail will continue to be free. the commercial > sendmail will be akin to Stronghold (a commercial, secure apache > w/enhancements) as opposed to free sendmail which is akin to the free > version of apache. Agreed. I think this is a fairly close analogy. (i.e. apache/stronghold) > I'm kinda fond of exim as a replacement for sendmail cuz of its > compatibility with sendmail /etc/aliases and command line switches. These > two considerations I feel are most important for an MTA to qualify as a > drop-in replacement for sendmail. However Exim is encumbered under GPL. > Which blows it out of the running as a base component of any *BSD system. VMailer looks very promosing in this regard. It't not GPL (I may be wrong on this), and it's designed to be a drop in replacement for sendmail. Other good points include performance - right now it's faster than qmail, which is already significantly faster than sendmail for certain tasks. Also, I noticed that the author's test platform is FreeBSD, which certainly bodes well for it being shipped with the base FreeBSD system. I have no idea how far along VMailer has come, and if it can loose the "alpha" name tag, but I think it will certainly be a MTA with a great future on FreeBSD. My $.02 :-) -Mark > Qmail is a great MTA, but in no way does it qualify as a drop in replacement > for sendmail. One, it does not deliver to /var/mail, only to $HOME. That's a > good thing for security, but lousy if you have lots of email users without a > home directory. qmail by default does not use .forward, /etc/aliases and I > don't know the extent of it's sendmail command line compatibility. On the > other hand qmail does have a good license: > ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/softwarelaw.html :) Or at least I like the > authors interpretation of the law. > > Rather than replacing sendmail I would prefer to see /etc/rc* files modified > in such a way as to make it easier to replace it with another MTA in a clean > fashion. i.e. without having to hack the /etc/rc* files too much. > > -- > Yarema > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Mayo mark@vmunix.com RingZero Comp. http://www.vmunix.com/mark finger mark@vmunix.com for my PGP key and GCS code ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The problem is how do you build tools that understand your programs at a deeper semantic level." - James Gosling To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980319231045.26875>