Why is sendmail in the core of FreeBSD?

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On Sat, Sep 22, 2007 at 11:55:51AM +0100, Gabriel Dragffy wrote:
> Just been wondering about this. If you do a standard install of FreeBSD it 
> includes things such as a basic FTP daemon, all the various utilities such 
> as df, ls, etc. SSHD etc. I assum these are all in FreeBSDs core, as 
> developed in the same CVS repo. Having read the mails on this list for 
> several weeks it seems obvious that most people regard Postfix or EXIM to 
> be the best MTAs, so I'm wondering why is sendmail the MTA that is integral 
> to FreeBSD? Wouldn't it be ace to have the default one be Postfix or 
> something?

At the time sendmail was integrated into FreeBSD other MTA's were
pretty much out of the question. Ever since then, the integration
has been very well-maintained (thanks to gshapiro) and changing
the default MTA to something else is simply not worth the pain
that comes with it.

Personally I use Postfix wherever I need an MTA, it only takes a
few minutes to install it from ports. The benefit of ports is you
can configure all the options you need. We can't keep mysql
client and dovecot sasl in the base system, most people would
have to reinstall Postfix from ports even if it was the default
MTA in our base.