mail server setup questions

[Bill Vermillion]

In the last exciting episode of the
freebsd-questions-request at freebsd.org saga on Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at
06:27 , freebsd-questions-request at freebsd.org as heard to say:

> Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 11:37:11 +1000
> From: Norberto Meijome <freebsd at meijome.net>
> Subject: Re: mail server setup questions
> To: "Bob Johnson" <fbsdlists at gmail.com>
> Cc: Andrey Shuvikov <mr.hyro at gmail.com>, freebsd-questions at freebsd.org

> On Wed, 5 Sep 2007 16:52:56 -0400
> "Bob Johnson" <fbsdlists at gmail.com> wrote:

> > In case I haven't made myself clear, I despise Qmail with a
> > passion. I suppose it is suitable for people who like puzzles
> > (as in "What patches do I need to make this do something
> > useful?" or "What third-party tool do I need to make sense
> > out of these awful log files?") and who don't mind inflicting
> > lots of unnecessary secondary spam on the rest of the world.
> > Yes, I know there are _supposed_ to be patches that fix that
> > problem, but (a) the one I've seen in action doesn't work very
> > well, and (b) you shouldn't need to apply third-party patches
> > to your mail server to make it do what it is supposed to do in
> > the first place.

> I second all these points. I think it's probably better to use
> sendmail than qmail. Sendmail at least supports most (all?)
> SMTP / antispam related features, it is well documented ,
> and configurable to the extreme (with the caveat that its
> configuration may be a bit daunting to the un-initiated :D).
>
> I just realised that qmail appears over and over in Linux
> distros, or at least on linux servers i've had to suffer... not
> sure the relationship there (in design / philosophy...)... and I
> am really NOT wanting to start a flame war. Just a thought that
> crossed my mind as I was reading this thread.

> Best,
> B

I've been using sendmail for years, once it got stable, and I moved
from Smail.  This was on a SysV.3 from Esix.

However one day I decided to see what all the hoopla over qmail
was about.  So I went into the ports and ran make.

Much to my suprise, qmail installed 6 separate accounts in the
pasword file.  This was just with a make and NOT make install.

That at the very least is very rude behaviour.  And another problem
with qmail from what I've read is that if you send mail to
several people on the same server, instead of doing what all
other MTA's do - and send ONE mail with all addresses, qmail
will generate a separate email for each user - putting un-needed
loads on your server and the recipients machine.

And the last time the qmail tar file that you get when you run
make has been changed was March 4, 2001.  Anyone who even thinks
that a piece of software that it 6 years old has no flaws had best
re-think this.  The last patches were in 2003.

ISTR that I heard DJB speak at a Usenix conference many years ago
and I was less than impressed with his "I'm better than any of
you" attitude.

Many seem to share that feeling - so consider me prejudiced.

Bill


-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com