Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1998 12:04:57 -0500 From: "Yarema" <yds@dppl.com> To: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Sendmail going commercial, and ? Message-ID: <006d01bd5422$4fba42b0$1f40e6cd@ichiban.ingress.com>
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Mark Mayo <mark@vmunix.com> wrote: >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. VMailer is definitely NOT GPL: http://www.clark.net/~proberts/vmailer/COPYRIGHT.html Looks like a very BSD like license from IBM. :) They (IBM Research) seem to have the right attitude about distribution: "If you don't give it away, you might as well throw it away." I went through www.VMailer.org site and it seems like Wietse Venema is addressing all the issues I was bringing up about qmail. I run qmail on my own machines, which are rather lightly loaded, so switching MTAs is not such a big deal. I was pushing for my employer (an ISP) to give me a green light to use qmail on the his mail servers. The primary motivation being to cut down on spam and unauthorized relaying. After comparing qmail with exim we decided on exim. Which seems to have been designed with all the anti-spam tricks built in. Now I'm perfectly aware that both sendmail and qmail can use the RBL http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ but they both have to be patched to do so. Both are harder to configure against unauthorized relaying. And sendmail is just inefficient and prone to security bugs. qmail is probably the most efficient mailer around, which is why Wietse regards it as VMailer's only serious competitor. qmail's author seems to suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome. Many of his improvement's are good, but he tries to force you into using them rather than providing a traditional sendmail-like environment as the default. If he did the latter there might not have been a need for VMailer. Given the abundance of MTA I think it's insane to even consider writing yet another one specifically for the FreeBSD project. I don't even think replacing sendmail as the default is worth considering. Who'd wanna deal with all those lost souls who spend half a lifetime learning and customizing sendmail.cf whining after an upgrade? Making it easier to plug in a replacement for sendmail is very worth while, me thinks. Perhaps even offering a choice of MTAs during a fresh install. -- Yarema To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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