On 7 May 2021, at 15:31, Steven Champeon via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> wrote: > I know that sendmail rulesets have been compared to modem line noise and > Mr. Dithers' cursing, and can attest to the fact that writing them is > far more satisfying than reading them, but you have almost infinite > customization capacity if you can stand it. I once mentioned to a friend > (who used to write for sendmail.net when that was a thing) that you > could probably fit all of the people with as much experience writing > sendmail rulesets as I had into a Volvo station wagon, and his reply was > "you could fit more if you pulped them first", so don't take this as a > recommendation for sendmail; I'll eventually have to give up on it and > surrender to whatever the vox populi says I need to use.
Well, this dinosaur started using Sendmail in 2004 at the great old age of 22, with completely hand-crafted cf (because!!!), as at the time it was unique in having DSN support, and to be honest I struggle to see what’s so terrible about it even now. It’s primary failing seems to be that it (still!) cannot deliver multi-recipient mail concurrently without using it in a queue-only mode, which introduces a delay (however small) and in any case doesn’t use the network efficiently to deliver multi-recipients per destination MX. If somebody knows how I might fix that, then I might go back to Sendmail from Exim (having gone by way of Postfix and even Xmail). The persistent security holes in Exim, though I am quite aware the maintainers are fixing them when they find them, do make the claims of some of Exim’s more militant defenders about its superior security compared to Sendmail look a little bit silly (though I will freely acknowledge that its setuid-root and monolithic philosophy has distinct advantages, as well as being really quite cute). I also admit to being annoyed that Debian insists on compiling Exim against GNUTLS instead of OpenSSL, which just makes using Exim harder on that platform. Postfix isn’t bad, but I find it just a bit too reductionist. In theory you can use its facilities in a general way, but in practice you need extra daemons and plugins. I have this particular requirement to do envelope and header rewriting, but only to the sender addresses, and based on the initial recipient. I still can’t figure out how that would be done “the Postfix way”, though I’m sure there’s probably a way with a proxy or something. It also does destination-based routing using the domain and not the MX, for the purposes of concurrent deliveries, and depending on your setup a big part of getting your configuration right is deciding how much load you’re prepared to sacrifice to outbound SMTP both during idle periods when scripting environments aren’t chewing up memory, and also during active periods, while they are. This turns out to be surprisingly challenging. Cheers, Sabahattin _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
