Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 08:11:42 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: "Taylor Dondich" <thexder@lvcm.com>, <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: qmail (Was: Maintaining Access Control Lists ) Message-ID: <p05101509b8c47b17d088@[10.0.1.8]> In-Reply-To: <000c01c1d3ab$6d2c6960$6600a8c0@penguin> References: <F61GQUEYvZmDvHbYxPo0000a6bd@hotmail.com><20020323002608.B20699@ra in.macguire.net><3C9C84CF.2090300@flash.net><20020323084327.A354@r ain.macguire.net><3C9DF87D.5050306@cream.org> <p05101505b8c430e28572@[10.0.1.9]> <000c01c1d3ab$6d2c6960$6600a8c0@penguin>
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At 7:16 PM -0800 2002/03/24, Taylor Dondich wrote: > I've got to say this was one of the most entertaining peices of e-mail I've > read all day; furthermore, it was the most informative of them all. I just > started using qmail as my mail delivery system of choice because sendmail > was EXTREMELY difficult to configure in the ways that I wanted. I've never had problems configuring sendmail to do the things I want, but then I recognized in 1994 that the configuration file syntax is basically a data-driven self-recursive language, similar to Prolog. I never had a problem with it after that. ;-) More recent versions of sendmail have become easier to configure, but there is still a lot of deep magic you need to understand, if you want to implement more complex tasks for which m4 macros have not yet been created, or just generally want/need to do something that doesn't fit into the standard sendmail "flow" of doing things. This is one of the reasons why I started looking seriously at postfix, and got involved with it at a very early stage (back when Wietse was still calling it VMail). There have been a number of recommendations that I have made to Wietse regarding suggested improvements, and most of them were made in short order (it took me a little while longer to get him to come around on some of the others ;-). IMO, postfix is not yet quite a 100% drop-in replacement for sendmail, but it does handle 99% of the job, and most people won't need that last 1% it doesn't yet do. Moreover, postfix has the simplest configuration language that I have ever seen for any program, and the largest set of "sane but secure" defaults -- It is entirely possible to have a fully functional postfix installation where the entire configuration file is just two lines long. Just try having a two-line configuration file for any other program on the planet.... Okay, any other general-purpose MTA. ;-) > I'm > beginning to start up a webhosting service with virtual domain hosting with > full e-mail services and qmail was frankly the only package out there with > the commitment and features that seemed close to my liking. I was also > looking at the other tools out there that I could slap on top of qmail to > make it more functional (vpopmail, sqwebmail, etc). Granted, there are a number of add-on features that have been created for qmail. I believe that it is possible to duplicate those features, or significantly improve on them, using other programs with other MTAs (including sendmail and postfix), but it would take more work to do so because you'd have to take a number of programs from different groups and put them together. However, this is the real power of the Unix "toolbox" philosophy -- you can put the tools together that you want, in most any way you want, making the result do just about whatever you want. Unfortunately, Dan breaks this philosophy by tightly integrating all his tools together, and making it so that they are all interdependent. For example, you can't use the standard inetd that ships with your system, you are instead forced to use his tcpserver. And heaven help you if you need to do something that isn't covered by his tools, because Dan sure won't. If qmail does everything you need and does it in a way that you can comprehend, then you would be pretty foolish to just throw all that away because of personality issues with the author. Nevertheless, I would encourage you to look at alternatives, because sooner or later I believe that you are either going to need to do something that Dan does not consider to be important, or you are going to run afoul of personality issues with him yourself -- either way, you will then be out in the cold. -- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be> Do you hate Microsoft? Do you hate Outlook? Then visit the Anti-Outlook page at <http://www.rodos.net/outlook/>; and see how much fun you can have. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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