Why is sendmail in the core of FreeBSD?

Erik Trulsson ertr1013 at student.uu.se
Sat Sep 22 04:26:47 PDT 2007


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?
> 

Sendmail was originally developed for BSD (the ancestor to FreeBSD).  At
that time none of the current alternatives (postfix/qmail/exim) existed yet.
So the reason Sendmail is included in FreeBSD is mainly historical - it has
always been there.

If the default MTA were changed many existing users would be quite upset
when their working configurations suddenly stopped working - so one should
not change the default MTA without a very good reason.

For a new user it does not really matter that much which MTA is installed by
default, if they are not familiar with any of them.
Installing an alternative from ports only takes a couple of minutes anyway.







-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se


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