Re: Er.... for Sendmail users......

Arthur Corliss wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Damien Hull wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> I don't have time to waste on advocacy, but let me share with you some
> facts:
>
> 1) You don't have to learn a programming/scripting language for 99%
> of everything you want to do in Sendmail. Sendmail does
> generate configs using GNU's m4 processor, just like
> thousands of other programs, so it doesn't hurt to learn
> that. I know a lot of admins that don't even know m4 and
> still manage to configure sendmail.
> 2) It takes me about half an hour to get a mail server up and running
> with sendmail w/miltering (performing content filtering, virus
> scanning, etc.) on Nevaeh Linux, which is a source based
> distribution. Out of that half hour only about five minutes
> of my time is required.
> 3) Sendmail has *several* greylisting milters available, and you
> can add your own in mimedefang with about ten lines of Perl.
> 4) Sendmail also has something called GREET_PAUSE out of the box
> which gives you most of the benefits of greylisting with no
> work at all.
> 5) I use sendmail because:
>
> a) there's nothing it can't do for mail routing/handling,
> b) I have yet to find another daemon that has even 75% of its
> flexibility,
> c) as the industry standard it's already everywhere and sometime
> it's not worth installing *more* software when it's part
> of the base OS,
>
> No offense, Damien, but just because you couldn't figure it out
> doesn't mean
> it's an inferior product and deserves to die. Is there a steep learning
> curve? Sure. But once you invest that time it's all downhill from
> there, and
> it makes hard tasks with other daemons trivial.
>
> In short, folks, if you want to simple things I'm sure other daemons
> make it
> easier than sendmail. If you every get into large scale ISP or
> enterprise
> mail you'll find sendmail on a very short list of capable products.
>
> --Arthur Corliss
> Bolverk's Lair -- http://arthur.corlissfamily.org/
> Digital Mages -- http://www.digitalmages.com/
> "Live Free or Die, the Only Way to Live" -- NH State Motto
I would agree that my inability to figure out sendmail doesn't make it a
bad MTA. The company hosting my digitaloverload.net email uses sendmail.
However, I like the KISS method of administration. Keep everything as
simple as possible. I don't think sendmail falls into the KISS category .

Email servers are becoming very complex. There's the open relay issue,
spam and viruses etc... It has taken me years to figure out how to setup
a server that deals with these issues. Sendmails steep learning curve
justs adds to the complexity. If I remember correctly there were more
then a few config files I had to look at. How do you keep track of
what's in which file?

I'm not about to say that Postfix is easy. However, it does everything I
need and the learning curve was one I could handle. Everything you need
is in one or two config files. I should point out that some of the new
features require more config files. For simple email systems you don't
need the new features. It just adds to administration overhead. That's
my opinion any way.

I think greylisting is making things a lot simpler. No more fancy spam
filtering. I still use SpamAssassin though.

When talking to clients about email I recommend they have someone else
do it for them. Find a hosting company that provides the features you
want/need and call it a day. If they have to have email in house I stick
with the simple setup. Postfix!

To make this discussion interesting someone should jump in and recommend
Exim. ;-)
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Received on Thu Aug 24 10:37:35 2006