On Fri, 2007-05-01 at 11:13 +0100, Juerd wrote: > It's not SMTP, so it shouldn't be in the SMTP RFC :) > > One of the reasons to use /usr/sbin/sendmail is *avoiding* SMTP. > > > In my experience, every beginning perl web programmer writes > software > > which directly talks SMTP. > > I have seen people opening pipes to /usr/bin/sendmail MUCH more often, > especially from beginning Perl programmers. There are many books that > teach them this.
Yup. > > (Many even include the mail address in the command line and have an > injection security hole there.) > > > The problem is that this is not any "standard way". > > Even if a standard is de facto instead of official, it's still a > standard. /usr/sbin/sendmail certainly is the de facto standard, even > on > much more than just Linux. This illustrates the problem quite completely. The de facto standard WAS /bin/mail NOT /usr/sbin/sendmail but that is not the issue. I believe the original post was referring to the Debian policy on MTAs which, IIRC, refers to a "sendmail interface" but in that case this would apply only to Debian. But he is going to break his qmail installation (replacing a piece of it with qpsmtpd) and then try to have it deliver mail (since the /usr/sbin/sendmail "interface" is part of the old system that he broke). It doesn't concern me what other people do to their systems but I would like to avoid more confusion in an area which confused enough already. -- --gh
