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Sendmail Performance Tuning

Andy Murren submits this review of Nick Christenson's Sendmail Performance Tuning, writing "The first thing that I noticed about this book was how relatively thin it is at only 223 pages. This is compared to the O'Reilly Sendmail book by Bryan Costales and Eric Allman (a.k.a. the 'Bat Book') which weights in at 1232 pages. In this case, thin is good. The second thing that I noticed about the book is the quote from Eric Allman emblazoned across the top that proclaims 'This book is great.' That's rather ringing endorsement from the original creator of sendmail. But great what? A great technical reference? Companion to the bat book? Kindling? Now here is my sound bite about this book: 'One damned fine technical book.'" Read on for the rest of Andy's review. Sendmail Performance Tuning author Nick Christenson pages 256 publisher Addison Wesley rating 9 reviewer Andy Murren ISBN 0321115708 summary Compact but well-constructed book; shows you ways to cost-effectively improve your sendmail setup, and much of the rest of your system along the way.

This book was very easy to read and kept moving along. While I did not find it as much of a page turner as Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide, it did keep me interested. One word of warning though: do not read this when you are tired. You will miss some really good information and have to re-read parts.

I was surprised and very pleased with how much I learned about so many things about Unix, networking and hardware while learning more about sendmail. There is a wide range of information presented that readers at almost any skill level would be able to use. The writing style and use of language was easy to read. The wealth of information packed into the pages of this book I found immediately usable on my Linux boxes and for my job.

I think the only drawback to the book was that there was not more specific sendmail information. Due to the nature of the topic, a lot of the book is devoted to how Unix systems work, more than specific sendmail configuration tasks. Time and detail is spent on other more important considerations such as logging, disk performance, test planning and file systems.

Chapter 1 gets us started with an overview of tuning in general. One of the more important themes of the book is established up front: It is that a cost/benefits analysis should be done for each step.

Sections 1.5, "Tuning Isn't Always Necessary" and 1.6, "Not So Fast ..." establish baseline considerations for making a decision on what, if any, tuning efforts should be made. Throughout the book Christenson reminds the reader to decide on a path that is most cost effective for his organization. Is it the most cost-effective use of the company money and time to have the IT staff hand-craft solutions, or is it better to throw some hardware at the problem?

Let's face it -- if you are running sendmail for a small company and only move a few hundred emails a week, how much performance tuning do you need? If, however, you are running an ISP, a mailing list server or a medium- (or even a large-) sized company mail server, then you need to tune your mail server. This is the book for you. The information in this book, while oriented for sendmail, is actually applicable for tuning any Unix based Mail Transport Agent (MTA) server.

Each solution is an individual matter, that is wholly dependent on several factors. Some of these factors are: volume of email, what the main use of the email system is, how the end users interact with the system, what hardware is being used, how much bandwidth you have and much time and money you have to throw at the problem. Of course, what management considers important is the overriding factor in all decisions.

Chapter 2 is a ten-page introductory overview to sendmail, covering versions, obtaining the (Open Source) code and building sendmail. One of the important things covered is the queue and message spool layouts and permissions. This is helpful for making sense of things later in the book.

A few very important pages are spent on creating the .cf file and why you should use M4, the macro language, for managing the configuration files. Having hand-crafted a .cf file myself several years ago then having to deal with maintaining it, I can vouch for the wisdom of using M4.

The maintainers of sendmail update the M4 macros for new features and changes. The 200 - 300 lines of M4 macro files are converted into a 1500to 2000 line configuration file. While it may be easier to figure out the configuration file to make changes, those changes may not be valid from one version of sendmail to the next.

Christenson admits that he does not always use M4 when in a rush or to test some things. What he does is copy the working configuration file to sendmail.cf.REAL before making changes and updating the .mc file afterward.

The next chapter, Chapter 3 'Tuning Email Relaying' starts with an overview of the email relaying sequence. Most of the discussion in this chapter is not sendmail specific. The importance of data synchronization is emphasized here. Section 6.1 of RFC 2821 is quoted, where it states the email server 'MUST NOT lose the message'. Once that is stated and understood all of the requirements that are discussed in the rest of the chapter are clear.

The next 17 pages are spent discussing how file systems, networking and effective use of file space support, and can detract from, meeting the edict of the RFC. For me, these sections are some of the most interesting, filled with information presented in a concise, readable and detailed manner. I learned a lot about what impact some very basic decisions have on email performance. I also learned how much better I could have made the email servers I have worked on. I will be turning to this chapter the next time I am putting together a box, be it a web server, mail server, file server or even a workstation or laptop. This is a great chapter that can help with any system configuration.

Email reception is covered in chapter 4. Different strategies for verifying recipient, tuning POP and IMAP are covered. Effective use of Local Delivery Agents (LDAs), including procmail, is covered here also.

Additionally, an excellent discussion of storage systems, including disks and solid-state disks, is in this chapter. The sections covering RAID levels, benchmarking and use are well written and informative. Available options on drives, ATA vs. SCSI, Solid State, are just as well done. Section 4.4.2, 'Stupid Disk Drive Tricks,' has some nifty information about how to set up disk drives for even better performance.

Sending email is the next chapter. Here we see some more sendmail-specific information. Tuning of mailing lists and mass mailing is part of the discussion here. One of the more important sections is 'Draining Queues.' How backups are caused and what to do to recover are discussed in this section. This has good information that can be used with any MTA.

One of the most important chapters for me is Chapter 6 'Configuration, Security and Architecture.' Sendmail specific configuration and tuning options are discussed. Section 6.1 covers configuration and is in many ways the heart of the book. This is where sendmail directives that can directly impact performance are covered. How a system's architecture (and DNS) is laid out can have a significant impact on performance.

The section on security is good, but brief. Most of the discussion is on privacy and stopping spam. The use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) is covered in less than a page. With a smattering of security in other parts of the book, this is the sum total of the security discussion of the book. Considering some of the problems with sendmail in the past, I would have liked some more information on this topic.

The next two chapters, 'Finding and Removing Bottlenecks' and 'Load Generation and Testing,' are good, solid, well-written sections that are applicable to most any email system. We are given some effective ways of making systems run better, and how to prove that the system actually does work better. This is where we justify to the boss that the work we have done is really cost effective.

Chapter 9, 'Conclusion' is basically a very brief wrap up and a list of books Christenson thinks we should read.

My own conclusion is that I have learned and relearned a lot of things about Unix and email. Even if you do not use sendmail, I recommend this book without reservation. It is an excellent reference on general system performance tuning, with information on making your sendmail installation run better.

Table of contents
  1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Performance Tuning Examples
    • 1.2 sendmail Versions Covered
    • 1.3 Definitions
    • 1.4 Email Server Tasks
    • 1.5 Tuning Isn't Always Necessary
    • 1.6 Not So Fast...
    • 1.7 Email System Profiling
    • 1.8 General Tuning Ideas
    • 1.9 Summary
  2. Sendmail Introduction
    • 2.1 Obtaining Sendmail
    • 2.2 Building Sendmail
    • 2.3 Creating a .cf file
    • 2.4 Why Use M4?
    • 2.5 System Setup
    • 2.6 Summary
  3. Tuning Email Relaying
    • 3.1 What Happens During Relaying
    • 3.2 Synchronization
    • 3.3 File Systems
    • 3.4 File Space
    • 3.5 Networking
    • 3.6 Summary
  4. Tuning Email Reception
    • 4.1 What Happens During Email Reception
    • 4.2 Recipient Verification
    • 4.3 Storage Systems
    • 4.4 Disks
    • 4.5 Solid State Disks
    • 4.6 POP Tuning Specifics
    • 4.7 Message Storage Hashing
    • 4.8 IMAP Tuning Specifics
    • 4.9 Summary
  5. Tuning Email Sending
    • 5.1 Mailing Lists
    • 5.2 Command-Line Message Generation
    • 5.3 Draining Queues
    • 5.4 Another Mailing List Strategy
    • 5.5 SMTP PIPELINING
    • 5.6 More Notes on Mass Mailing
    • 5.7 Summary
  6. Configuration, Security and Architecture
    • 6.1 Configuration
    • 6.2 Security and Performance
    • 6.3 Other General Strategies
    • 6.4 Summary
  7. Finding and Removing Bottlenecks
    • 7.1 Kernel Parameters Run Amok
    • 7.2 The Quick Fix
    • 7.3 Tools
    • 7.4 syslog
    • 7.5 Removing Bottlenecks
    • 7.6 Summary
  8. Load Generation and Testing
    • 8.1 Test System Setup
    • 8.2 Testing Tools
    • 8.3 Load Testing Pitfalls
    • 8.4 Summary
  9. Conclusion

You can purchase Sendmail Performance Tuning from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

193 comments

  1. Qmail! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Why use sendmail at all when you can use Qmail, which is smaller, easier, simpler, and faster by an order of magnitude???

    1. Re:Qmail! by Rob-sif · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Qmail is nice.

      Bitch to install sometimes, though.

    2. Re:Qmail! by EnderWiggnz · · Score: 1, Funny

      so... how would you describe installing sendmail?

      --
      ... hi bingo ...
    3. Re:Qmail! by T3kno · · Score: 2

      Because no self respecting geek has ever taken the easy road. This coming after I just wrote my first sendmail configuration file from scratch. It's a right of passage.

      --
      (B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
    4. Re:Qmail! by EnderWiggnz · · Score: 5, Funny

      i've always started by openning up a modem connection, picking up the phone, sneezing into the receiver and capturing the output as my sendmail.conf

      --
      ... hi bingo ...
    5. Re:Qmail! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      One is Free Software, and one is not. That's important to some of us.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    6. Re:Qmail! by wyvern5 · · Score: 1

      Well, for me, "installing" sendmail consisted of adjusting a few flags in configuration files (OS X). Installing qmail consisted of many hours of frustration and an eventually non-working mail server. All qmail setup instructions that I could find have steps in them that do not apply in OS X, and though I tried to accomplish the same task using OS X tools like niutil, I still couldn't get qmail to launch. Besides, I'm only hosting mail for myself so sendmail works for my needs.

      --
      -- Apple: Where Microsoft wants to go today.
    7. Re:Qmail! by axxackall · · Score: 2

      Then use Courier MTA or MTA+IMAP server, which is same maildir compatible as qmail, fast and beside: it's GPL - what can be more free than GPL?

      --

      Less is more !
    8. Re:Qmail! by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2
      Then use Postfix.

      Bruce

    9. Re:Qmail! by gweihir · · Score: 2

      No reason. I use qmail since I had a look at sendmail configuration 2 years ago and turned away in horror from that configuration interface nightmare.

      Although many others in my department, including the main mail server, use postfix.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
    10. Re:Qmail! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      I'm still partial to Sendmail (probably because I'm used to it by now), but that would definitely be my second choice (for technical and license reasons).

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    11. Re:Qmail! by Insane+One · · Score: 1

      I guess that would be the same argument of Linux version Microsoft. Linux may have commercial support but it is still 'free'. Inter7. (among others) provide commercial support for qmail and their products like Vpopmail (virtual mail add-on for Qmail). Vpopmail is free also.
      Many companies use Qmail like Netzero ...if I remember correctly they use qmail for all their smtp and possibly their pop3.

      --
      "I have gone to look for myself, If I return before I get back keep me here"
    12. Re:Qmail! by Insane+One · · Score: 1

      I have used qmail for quite a few years now and it is great! Installing it and configuring it was 1000% easier then sendmail. Virtual domains are so simple in qmail. I don't even want to think about doing this with sendmail, gives me a headache just thinking about it. If you install vpopmail available from
      Inter7. makes the domain management even easier plus it works mysql.
      I know I will never switch.

      --
      "I have gone to look for myself, If I return before I get back keep me here"
    13. Re:Qmail! by shepd · · Score: 1

      >One is Free Software, and one is not.

      How is Qmail not Free Software, other than the fact it doesn't have the GPL license?

      Software doesn't have to be GPL to be free, you know. And those that've seen my previous posts know I'm a pretty heavy supporter of the GPL.

      --
      If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
    14. Re:Qmail! by TorinEdge · · Score: 1

      ...only to sit on hold for two hours waiting for the support guy to tell you what any good HOWTO doc will. That and then he'll tell you that the task you'd like to perform is not available in this version. That'll be 295$ please, have a nice day.

      --
      "If you're going through Hell, keep going." -Winston Churchill
    15. Re:Qmail! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      Sendmail is BSD-licensed. From a corporate perspective, it's even freer.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    16. Re:Qmail! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      RITE of passage.

      Not right.

    17. Re:Qmail! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2
      How is Qmail not Free Software, other than the fact it doesn't have the GPL license?

      The fact that you cannot distribute modified versions of it pretty much moves it into the non-Free camp.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    18. Re:Qmail! by EugeneK · · Score: 1

      I used to use sendmail, but I switched to postfix. I hated having to process sendmail's config files with m4. Not a big deal for an expert I guess, but for an amateur like me, I just want to edit the config file and restart, like I do for any other service.

    19. Re:Qmail! by nbvb · · Score: 2

      Because qmail doesn't speak LDAP?

    20. Re:Qmail! by shepd · · Score: 1

      >The fact that you cannot distribute modified versions of it pretty much moves it into the non-Free camp.

      He allows patches, and, AFAIK, you can distribute the patches along with the original, unmodified, source. And, again, AFAIK, there's no limit to how big the patches may be.

      If you feel that the requirement that you must include, as part of the makefile:

      patch -p1 < ./UPDATE-01-02-03

      is a limitation on your freedom, I hardly think it's fair to call the GPL free (not that you did, but I kinda have to assume that's what the original poster meant by free, being that he used 2/3s of the FSF's name, and in capitals too).

      I, for one, feel completely comfortable calling any software where I may make modifications, distribute those modifications, and distribute the original software, free. But that's just me...

      --
      If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
    21. Re:Qmail! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      In FreeBSD, there exists an /etc/mail/Makefile. After you edit the .mc file, you just "make install; make restart". Yes, you still have to process the config file, but at least it's 100% automated.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    22. Re:Qmail! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      An SMTP server doesn't speak LDAP? Why should it? You can add LDAP functionality from one of the patches on qmail.org or through the QMail-LDAP project.

    23. Re:Qmail! by jeremyp · · Score: 2

      If your SMTP server has to route mails to different mail servers depending on the recipient address, LDAP support is very useful. You can also do things like move your alias tables into the LDAP server, use the LDAP server to authenticate people for routing (SMTP AUTH), use the LDAP server to masquerade senders etc etc etc.

      LDAP is supported out of the box with sendmail, no need to download extra patches and stuff.

      --
      All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
    24. Re:Qmail! by axxackall · · Score: 2

      How does it make it freer? Do you think that any corporation wants to fork the source code of MTA server and resell? They wanna use it, not fork it. Besides, you still can fork GPL code, just don't forget about source code availability if you resell it. But again, who wants to resell any MTA server without sources?

      --

      Less is more !
    25. Re:Qmail! by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      It would be a reasonable business proposition to build a GUI-controlled mailserver appliance powered by Sendmail, with all sorts of proprietary backend stuff.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    26. Re:Qmail! by nbvb · · Score: 2

      The mere fact that you have to link to a web site called "lifewithqmail" to point out a patch to a 5-year-old MTA to incorporate even basic LDAP functionality highlights why I use Sendmail.

      Sendmail's not NEARLY the problem it used to be. It's a whole lot better than ever before, and it works out of the can without Dan Bernstein's mess all over it.

      Philosophically, I couldn't use software written by such a jerk anyway.

    27. Re:Qmail! by nbvb · · Score: 2

      absolutely. I guess the parent poster hasn't even run a *REAL* mail server where quantity_of_users > 5.

      --NBVB

    28. Re:Qmail! by tigga · · Score: 1

      www.sendmail.com ;)))

    29. Re:Qmail! by duffbeer703 · · Score: 2

      Because while Qmail works great, it's just plain weird. It uses a bizarre directory structure, requires several local users and is quite simply an obnoxious program to deal with.

      --
      Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
    30. Re:Qmail! by odaiwai · · Score: 2

      > and is quite simply an obnoxious program to deal with. ...and then there's the author...

      dave

    31. Re:Qmail! by binarie · · Score: 0

      I use Sendmail, I have the 'bat book', and I love them both.

      Just because you can't properly configure it, it doesn't mean it sucks. Yes Sendmail is big and has a history of security hole and more like a bloatware now, but it's only because it has been around for a very long time and went thought a lot of tests and changes. If Qmail would be around (and used) as much as sendmail I am very sure there would be a lot more sercurity holes found in Qmail than sendmail.

      Also, sendmail is like the "father" service upon which all other programs lookup and try to be like it, supporting same protocols and options, while trying to develop an easier accesses to configuration.

      Yes, First time it took me couple weeks to get into it, but once you start understand some basic rule sets and options, you realize that there is almost no limit in configuring this great software.

    32. Re:Qmail! by lars_stefan_axelsson · · Score: 1
      is a limitation on your freedom, I hardly think it's fair to call the GPL free (not that you did, but I kinda have to assume that's what the original poster meant by free, being that he used 2/3s of the FSF's name, and in capitals too). I, for one, feel completely comfortable calling any software where I may make modifications, distribute those modifications, and distribute the original software, free. But that's just me...

      Yeah, it's just you ;-) Since you brought up the GPL; the SFS's position on the subject is:

      Daniel Bernstein's licenses:
      These licenses are not free software licenses because they do not permit publication of modified versions.

      So I wouldn't call it "unfair" to call Dan Bernsteins licences "unfree" while calling the GPL "free." They defined the term after all...

      --
      Stefan Axelsson
    33. Re:Qmail! by jo42 · · Score: 2

      I've always pharted my sendmail.cf into the handset...

    34. Re:Qmail! by JerkBoB · · Score: 1

      requires several local users

      Better to just run everything as root, right?

      --
      A host is a host from coast to coast...
      Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
    35. Re:Qmail! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Better to write a secure app or use a "Trusted" operating system with ACLs and a built in ability to delegate authority.

      Have 5 users run an MTA is a cheap hack around an obsolescent administration model.

    36. Re:Qmail! by rjamestaylor · · Score: 1
      I have to agree with the trolls: a visa is a right of passage (along with a valid passport).

      :P

      --
      -- @rjamestaylor on Ello
  2. Oh Yes! by cca93014 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I will buy this book, and file it under "oxymorons I have known and loved"

  3. Sendmail Performance Tuning - the short guide by gowen · · Score: 1
    # rpm -e sendmail
    #rpm -i exim-foo.bar.rpm

    That ought to do it... (Debian wienies can feel free to use apt there or *chortle* dselect)

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    1. Re:Sendmail Performance Tuning - the short guide by dzelenka · · Score: 3, Funny

      Us Debian weenies have exim installed by default. This Debian weenie does prefer to "apt-get install postfix". What is this Sendmail thing that everyone keeps talking about?

      --
      Bah!
    2. Re:Sendmail Performance Tuning - the short guide by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You missed out the "Failed dependencies" output from your rpm command.

    3. Re:Sendmail Performance Tuning - the short guide by gweihir · · Score: 2

      Us Debian weenies have exim installed by default. This Debian weenie does prefer to "apt-get install postfix". What is this Sendmail thing that everyone keeps talking about?

      LOL! A pity I just wasted my last moderator point on something not half as funny some minutes ago!

      Qmail is a little more difficult with Debain, but an qmail-src package exists and works for me.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
    4. Re:Sendmail Performance Tuning - the short guide by ncc74656 · · Score: 2
      # rpm -e sendmail
      # rpm -i exim-foo.bar.rpm

      Better yet, go with a distro that doesn't foist Sendmail on you by default...you can then do something like this:

      # emerge qmail

      --
      20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
  4. apache and sendmail books not quite useful by stonebeat.org · · Score: 4, Insightful

    i have seen many books on apache and sendmail. and i have quite a few of them. i rarely consult them. when i need to find out anything, i m most like to type it into google, or search newsgroup (deja). this includes apache/tomcat performance tuning.

    I have administered NIS+ apache, and sendmail, and these topics are so vast, that buying books doesn't help. However searching through google/deja does help a lot.

    But that is just my opinion....

  5. Sendmail tuning? by zulux · · Score: 4, Insightful


    Tuning Sedmail is about as smart as tuning MS Exchange. Both are fat, bloated, and have a history of secutiry holes. Performance tuning Sendmail is like performance tuning an AMC Gremlin made out of spare junkyard parts - you end up with a cobbeled peice of crap with a spoiler.

    Sendmail is so bloated that it apparently takes books to get decent performance out of it.

    Sendmail doesen't fit the one of the core Unix ideas - use simple, robut and elegent programs, chained together, to do cool things.

    Check out Postfix or Qmail for decent replacements to Sendmail. Enjoy the performance of well toughtout software. Postfix was so easy to use, that I went from reading the man pages to a working system in one hour.

    --

    Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

    1. Re:Sendmail tuning? by spanky1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      use simple, robut and elegent programs

      Robut? You sound like Dr. Zoidberg on Futurama.

      But to stay on topic: We use sendmail at all of our locations because we enjoy the extremely powerful customizability. Yes, it is a little disconcerting trying to disect sendmail.cf, but once you get the hang of it it's not bad. I have never had to do any performance tweaks either.

    2. Re:Sendmail tuning? by zulux · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We use sendmail at all of our locations because we enjoy the extremely powerful customizability. Yes, it is a little disconcerting trying to disect sendmail.cf, but once you get the hang of it it's not bad. I have never had to do any performance tweaks either.

      There are a lot of good thing about Sendmail - but I'm afraid, for me, the good things are hidden in layers of suckyness.

      If someone sat down with the source code and only used the delete key - you could strip out the crap and make Sendmail cool. And, of course, change the sendmail.cf format to resemble somthing human readable.

      It's kind of like looking at a fat-girl, and saying to yourself "She'd be cute if she lost a few pounds". You know it's never going to happen, she'll just keep eating the Happy Meals. I fear Sendmail will keep on getting bigger as well...

      --

      Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

    3. Re:Sendmail tuning? by ZoneGray · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I haven't yet worked much with Postfix, but I hvae a couple of servers where I run qmail. I believed the hype at first, but eventually concluded that djb is one very, very disturbed person.

      I guess it works okay, but only a badly twisted mind could have devised the configuration system that qmail uses. Once you add one of the various virtual domain hacks it becomes nearly impenetrable. Then you try to integrate a mail list manager or spam tool, and before you know it, you're waist deep in GID's and SUID bits and log files, and you find yourself trying to read a Google translation from the original Slovenian.

    4. Re:Sendmail tuning? by samadhi · · Score: 1

      > Sendmail doesen't fit the one of the core Unix ideas - use simple, robut and elegent programs, chained together, to do cool things.

      Just because this is a feature of Unix doesn't mean that every application written on unix has to fit this form. If it were the case then we would not have mail at all we would just transfer all our files written in ex via kermit.

    5. Re:Sendmail tuning? by zulux · · Score: 2

      I believed the hype at first, but eventually concluded that djb is one very, very disturbed person.

      DJB is darn smart, but his software is not truly 'open', and as such, has a dubious future. His license, is just as much of a dead-end as propiatary software, so I chose to use Postfix and haven't regretted it at all.

      Postfix is simple, sane and easy to chain to other cool programs. It's quite easy to get Postfix to hand off an peice email for processing and retrive it at almost any point in the delivery chain.

      --

      Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

    6. Re:Sendmail tuning? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Informative
      I wouldn't have stated it quite so aggressively, but I have to agree. I used to run Sendmail on the Debian list server, around the time it got to 100,000 emails per day (it's probably at a Million now). It ran on a 486, with probably 32 meg of RAM (this was 5 or 6 years ago). Sendmail, of course, bogged down. I switched to qmail and noticed a tremendous performance increase. After qmail was fully released and I became disenchanted with Dan's non-licensing scheme, I was no longer the Debian list manager but switched my own operation to Postfix, which works admirably.

      The thing that Sendmail did well, address rewriting, is irrelevant for today's net, and can be done more readably in many other ways. Even a Perl script is much more readable :-) Installing one as a Postfix transport is trivial.

      I'm surprised that there isn't more business action around Postfix.

      Bruce

    7. Re:Sendmail tuning? by eyeball · · Score: 2

      Check out Postfix or Qmail for decent replacements to Sendmail...

      Agreed. The book I'd like to see is "Migrating to qmail from sendmail." (or even "How to Convince Your Boss to Adopt QMail and Stop Throwing Hardware at Sendmail."

      --

      _______
      2B1ASK1
    8. Re:Sendmail tuning? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      No kidding.

      We have a co-lo client who runs qmail on his machine. Usually it's great, fast and efficient.

      But when he has problems: OH CRAP I absolutely DREAD having to debug a qmail setup. All these little files and links and programs and configs. It makes absolutely no sense. I feel like djb just moved the confusing complexity out of the sendmail.cf file and shattered it into little shards and spread it throughout /var/qmail (what's up with using /var btw).

      Yes that's a good analogy. Figuring out qmail is like trying to collect the pieces of a broken christmas tree ornament.

      And once I've figured it all out.. I complete FORGET how it works the next day. In fact I think he *still* has some kind of junk in his ps listing I can't get rid of (apparently it "logs" to the farkin' *process name* when it has a problem so you see it in the ps list).

      I think djb is just a very gifted asshole. qmail is the code manifestation of his personality.

      I might try out postfix someday though.

    9. Re:Sendmail tuning? by GooberToo · · Score: 2

      I think postfix still has a local exploit.

    10. Re:Sendmail tuning? by benedict · · Score: 2

      Can you document your claim?

      --
      Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
    11. Re:Sendmail tuning? by FroMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Whoo-hoo! Replying to a Bruce post. :-P And not agreeing(sp?) with him.


      I have to say that the address rewriting in sendmail is necessary. And because of it, sendmail was the only option for what I needed to do a short while ago. Basically we were using fetchmail to retreive mail from a single multidrop box from our ISP for our department email. Then, for the relay outbound we had to determine if the email was to be sent locally or back up to the ISP if the user was not in our department. Then, after all that I still needed to add amavis(sp?). Sure, it was not the cleanest/most readable .cf file, but it was the only thing I could get to do the trick. When looking at postfix I did not see anything that allowed me to do the address rewriting to the granularity required. Then looking at qmail, well... to avoid four letter words I'll stop there.


      The best part of sendmail is actually its obtuse feature set. Its similar to cars with 4wd, most poeple don't need it, but when you do need it, its mighty nice to have.

      --
      Norris/Palin 2012
      Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
    12. Re:Sendmail tuning? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You type almost as well as Taco. Almost.

    13. Re:Sendmail tuning? by patter · · Score: 1

      Yes, just rememebered why the first time getting qmail up and running took me so long, by trying once again to replace sendmail with qmail.

      80% of the author's instructions are fine, from there, you have a choice of 10 or so slightly different ways of configuring the rest of it. Would be nice if the author kept his documentation up to date (he recommended running it from inetd at one time but that doesn't even work any longer).

      I decided to scrap it, because it was not apparent to me how to setup DNSBL, it seems like some other program with perhaps non-functional installation instructions is required for that.

      I'll stick with sendmail, it's been running on my home machine for 2+ years, it may mean I have to keep up with patches, and deal with sendmail.cf (the m4 files are a bit more understandable).

      But, next to no spam is more important than the fact that sendmail USED to have security problems. I also don't know why someone would think it's bloated. It consumes very little CPU on my machine - but then I only have one or two accounts to contend with.

      --
      -- If at first you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment. -- Harry F. Banks
    14. Re:Sendmail tuning? by Zapman · · Score: 3, Informative

      You (and the others following this thread) owe it to yourselves to give postfix a try. It is clean, and elegant. All of it's configs live in 2 files (main.cf and master.cf), and it is powerful.

      Postfix has solid anti-spam measures, fantastic performance, readable config files (that are well commented from the start... heck there are about 10-20 comment lines per config line), and you only need to set like 3 lines in the config to get a working mail server.

      --
      Zapman
    15. Re:Sendmail tuning? by GooberToo · · Score: 2

      Check the archives. Someguy through a huge fit about the author refusing to even acknoledge the fact that it's a problem even though everyone agrees that it is.

      Again, IIRC, Postfix has a local exploit. To my knowledge, it has never been fixed.

    16. Re:Sendmail tuning? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *threw even...

      shesh...wish you could edit

    17. Re:Sendmail tuning? by phr2 · · Score: 2

      I think you mean this.

    18. Re:Sendmail tuning? by GooberToo · · Score: 3, Informative

      postfix exploit

      Found this by typing, "postfix local exploit" on google. Seems there were tons of other hits on this too (about 6,900).

    19. Re:Sendmail tuning? by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 2

      The thing that Sendmail did well, address rewriting, is irrelevant for today's net, and can be done more readably in many other ways.

      address rewriting is irrelevant... Okay....

      Use address rewrite rules to pass messages with addresses that other process expect not ones that the user provides. Eg. user setups 'user@mail.domain.tld' and cyrus only knows 'user@domain.tld'.

      Address rewrites are useful for rewriting addresses when clients pull a random domain from system configuration, and sends that out in a message.

      rewrites are handy when to split users between servers, etc. There are lots more cases.

      Even a Perl script is much more readable :-) Installing one as a Postfix transport is trivial.

      Yeah, you do that. That's just 'screaming' performance, Bruce :)

      --
      Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
    20. Re:Sendmail tuning? by Tet · · Score: 2
      The thing that Sendmail did well, address rewriting, is irrelevant for today's net

      I couldn't disagree more. Address rewriting is essential on today's internet, and I've had to do a lot of it (both professionally, and to a lesser extent on my home systems). Without the flexibility sendmail provides, I'd be sunk. Sure, there are other alternatives, but since sendmail does everything I want without problems, why change? No, the cryptic config file isn't sufficient reason. Firstly, it's no more cryptic than other more "geek approved" tools, such as perl -- once you know what the different symbols mean, both start to make sense. Secondly, it's hard to provide the power of sendmail in a configuration language that's much less complex.

      --
      "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
    21. Re:Sendmail tuning? by benedict · · Score: 3, Informative

      The hole -- which was very, very small to begin
      with -- has been closed. Please stop spreading
      misinformation.

      --
      Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
    22. Re:Sendmail tuning? by ncc74656 · · Score: 2
      ...an AMC Gremlin made out of spare junkyard parts...

      <rimshot> Isn't that how they all left the factory? </rimshot>

      --
      20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
    23. Re:Sendmail tuning? by kashani · · Score: 1

      oh look it's 2003 and this Postfix bug FROM WAY BACK 1998 must still be relevent... unlike qmail, Postfix has active developement and doesn't require 3 extra packages and 45 patches to do useful things.

      And before you ask I was an admin on one of the largest qmail installations on the net, 10 Tb backend.

      kashani

      --
      - Why is the ninja... so deadly?
    24. Re:Sendmail tuning? by GooberToo · · Score: 2

      LOL!

      First of all, the hole was NOT small.

      Second of all, I did not assert that it was current information. Go back and read what I said.

      Please stop wasting bandwidth.

    25. Re:Sendmail tuning? by GooberToo · · Score: 2

      As far as I can remember, this was a problem. In fact, I remember people talking about it even in 2002. For such a widely known exploit, you would of thought, had it been fixed, people would of bothered to make it public.

      Go figure...

    26. Re:Sendmail tuning? by benedict · · Score: 2

      The hole was that an attacker could theoretically cause
      locally-submitted mail to be deleted. I say "theoretically"
      because it was quite difficult. I am not aware of any
      reports that this vulnerability was ever exploited in the
      field.

      --
      Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
    27. Re:Sendmail tuning? by GooberToo · · Score: 2

      I'm fully aware of what the exploit was. If you bothered to read it, you would of found that it would of actually been fairly easy to exploit. Furthermore, the write-up even offers additional information on how it could of been more easily exploited. Also, you seemed to of missed the part where users could submit mail from ANY local user without any trace where the mail originated from.

      Just because something hasn't been exploited doesn't mean it's hard. Second part of the exploit, which you seemingly overlooked, could of been exploited millions of times and chances are, no one would of ever known. Fact of the matter is, no one really knows if it was ever exploited.

      Seriously, this was a serious exploit and could of easily been exploited if someone had wanted to.

    28. Re:Sendmail tuning? by benedict · · Score: 2

      I read about this years ago, and I've discussed it
      with Wietse, and I stand by my assessment.

      --
      Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
    29. Re:Sendmail tuning? by GooberToo · · Score: 2

      Bluntly stated, your assessment is in error. In no way, shape, or form could this of ever been considered to be a "small hole" or minor. As local application exploits go, it's about as big as it gets short of delivering root access.

      If you have any application which is to perform task-x and an exploit can be used to destroy and and all work that should be achieved by doing task-x, I'd say you should just burn your box because it's worthless. In other words, it was a VERY significant issue. The fact that the author refused to even acknowledge the significance of such an issue pretty much demotes him to the realm of the ignorant, not to mention blind and closed minded.

      I honestly don't have a problem with Postfix, per se, however, I have a significant problem with the blind leading the blind and then bragging about how blind they are. As if it were a bonus.

      Shesh..assess away...the rest of us will laugh. ;)

  6. Tuning for performance isn't really the problem by Jack+Wagner · · Score: 0, Troll

    The main problem with open source coders is their lack of formal technical training/education.

    While open source developers tend to have a lot of heart and desire they simply cannot overcome the technical deficiencies that come from lacking a formal education. I've consulted with many firms who were attempting to integrate OSS projects and I've seen heinous code and design decisions in most of them, anything from using a fast fourrier algorithm in a GUI application (Duh) to using an Olog(n) algorithm when you clearly need an Olog(1). Simple things like that which on the surface a layman has no knowledge about but a well trained professional can pick out in a second.

    For instance Robert Brooks in the "Mythical Man Month" cautions against using too many loops in your code as they can cause excessive wear on a CPU (by constantly hitting the same LII registers you cause a "burn in" on the bus which can lead to erratic and undefined CPU bahaviour) yet you continue to see OSS projects laden with FOR and WHILE loops. I have to wonder if perhaps there were some open source coding classes offered on the web that taught basic things like that if you wouldn't see a serious improvement in the underlying shoddy code written by most young hotshot coders.

    Warmest regards,
    --Jack

    --


    Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
    1. Re:Tuning for performance isn't really the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hehe.. olog(n).. nice

    2. Re:Tuning for performance isn't really the problem by EugeneK · · Score: 1

      Hi, I read your intresting post!! Pls send tips about how to prevent bus "burn in" thru excessive FOR and WHILE loops!
      KTHXBYE!

  7. Nice to see M4 by theonetruekeebler · · Score: 5, Funny
    It's good to see the author advocates using a macro tool and not hacking sendmail.cf directly. It's scary in there.

    I'm trying to remember who said this:

    When I first started working with sendmail, I was convinced that the cf file had been created by someone bashing their head on the keyboard. After a week, I realised this was, indeed, almost certainly the case
    --
    This is not my sandwich.
    1. Re:Nice to see M4 by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Absolutely. I'm convinced that people who bash Sendmail because of it's supposedly difficult configuration have never seen a sendmail.mc file.

      For example, this snippet from a production server's sendmail.mc will turn on DNS-based spam filtering, enable the use of procmail for local mail delivery, and define a smart host to send email through:

      FEATURE(dnsbl, `relays.ordb.org', `"550 Mail from " $&{client_addr} " rejected, see http://ordb.org/"')
      FEATURE(local_procmail)
      defi ne(`SMART_HOST', `mail.upstream.com')

      I won't argue that the equivalent sections of sendmail.cf are, well, opaque. However, I've literally never touched sendmail.cf, other than to look at it and thank $DEITY that a much simpler, human-readable configuration system exists.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    2. Re:Nice to see M4 by benedict · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sendmail is definitely more usable with m4. But it's still
      pretty annoying to have to preprocess one's config file.
      If I ran the world, sendmail would optionally preprocess
      its config file itself. In other words, you'd be able to use
      the m4 file directly.

      --
      Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
    3. Re:Nice to see M4 by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2
      But it's still pretty annoying to have to preprocess one's config file.

      No arguments here. Fortunately, some systems (such as FreeBSD) have scripts to automate the compilation, which eases the burden significantly. I don't have to remember the specific options to m4; I only have to type "make install".

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    4. Re:Nice to see M4 by odaiwai · · Score: 2

      Yeah, that's just *so* difficult to set up:

      cat /etc/mail/Makefile

      POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f bitdomain && echo bitdomain.db)
      POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f uudomain && echo uudomain.db)
      POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f genericstable && echo genericstable.db)

      all: ${POSSIBLE} virtusertable.db access.db domaintable.db mailertable.db sendmail.cf

      virtusertable.db : virtusertable
      makemap -f hash $@ /etc/sendmail.cf

      (This is Redhat 7.2, and I added the sendmail.mc make myself.)

      dave

    5. Re:Nice to see M4 by odaiwai · · Score: 2

      POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f bitdomain && echo bitdomain.db)
      POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f uudomain && echo uudomain.db)
      POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f genericstable && echo genericstable.db)

      all: ${POSSIBLE} virtusertable.db access.db domaintable.db mailertable.db sendmail.cf

      virtusertable.db : virtusertable
      makemap -f hash $@ < $<

      userdb.db : userdb
      makemap -f hash $@ < $<

      %.db : %
      makemap hash $@ < $<

      clean:
      rm -f *.db *~

      sendmail.cf: sendmail.mc
      m4 sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf

      (Damn html entities!)

    6. Re:Nice to see M4 by scottj · · Score: 1

      The tarball for sendmail itself comes packaged with these scripts. I believe that you simply type ./Build sendmail.cf from within the cf/cf directory in order to build it. ./Build install-cf will install it for you.

      --
      .-.--
    7. Re:Nice to see M4 by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      I'm using the Makefile that comes with FreeBSD. You can check it out at the web CVS browser. You might find some of the features kind of interesting.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  8. Sendmail: Theory and Practice by Reknamorken · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This book by Avolio and Vixie was the best one I ever read.

    Before I switched to Postfix...

    --

    Linux is UNIX.
  9. One word of warning though... by josephmerlynbath · · Score: 1

    One word of warning though: do not read this when you are tired. You will miss some really good information and have to re-read parts.

    Damnit! I'm always tired. Guess I can't read the book at all. :-(

  10. Performance tuning? by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'd figure a Spoiler, a few 'Type-R' stickers, a coffeecan exhaust, and a bolt on Turbo kit should do the job. Who needs ruddy books?

    --
    Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
  11. Simply, small, secure. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've forsaken Sendmail's bloat and twisted configuration for the straightforward and secure nature of Postfix.

    See http://www.postfix.org/

    1. Re:Simply, small, secure. by Znonymous+Coward · · Score: 2

      Yes, I've been using psotfix for almost 2 years now. It's a heck of a lot easier to configure than sendmail for sure (and secure too)!

      --

      Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.

    2. Re:Simply, small, secure. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm pretty sure there have been more security breaches in the past two years on the pf side rather than the sendmail side.

  12. Postfix by FreeLinux · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I'd rather use Postfix. Simple, powerful, secure and fast as hell.

  13. My sendmail.. by grub · · Score: 2


    .. always needs tuning. The strings need replacing, the wood frame warps in the humidity. It's a real bitch.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  14. Simplifying sendmail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anything that makes sense of the configuration bloat is much appreciated. Its difficult to install the newer versions let alone configure them. Most of us don't have the time to go to class after class to learn the ins and outs of sendmail, or all the other services we have to maintain. A book that isn't used is fairly useless.

    Just my 2c worth.

    M. Felzien

  15. What is with all the sendmail bashing? by mustangdavis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously people ... if you don't like sendmail, don't come in and bash it on a sendmail book review (btw: all of those posts SHOULD be modded off-topic).

    If you like another mail program, DO A BOOK REVIEW ON THAT MAIL PROGRAM and share your "wisdom" with the rest of us.

    As for sendmail, it is not meant for Windows weenies or wanna be Unix sysadmins, only for "real" Unix admins and those that wish to use a VERY robust product and are willing to learn the product to reap the rewards. I personally feel that this book is a great quick reference for when you have a brain fart and don't feel like mulling through the O'Reiley "bat-book" for a simple answer ... but nothing can ever replace "the real thing" ....

    ... and if you don't agree with me, be intelligent and post why ... don't moderate!

    Just my $0.02 cents

    ... preparing to dodge all of the "clippies" that will be thrown at me by the NT admins ... "


    1. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by mustangdavis · · Score: 2
      ... and if you don't agree with me, be intelligent and post why ... don't moderate!


      Cute ... Moderation Totals: Troll=1, Total=1.

      Folks, I'm not trolling here ... simply trying to make a point that it would be nice to see productive dialouge about the book being reviewed rather than seeing the program it covers get bashed to death ... but bashing sendmail doesn't get modded as "Troll" or "Off-Topic" ... how ironic ...
    2. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by greechneb · · Score: 2, Redundant

      I have to agree, this is a really a book review, and not a bash sendmail topic. I don't know who modded your post as troll, but it shouldn't be.
      If I had mod points right now, I would have used them to mod up.

      Intelligent post, I think the first one that doesn't bash sendmail. There should be a lot of -1 redundant mods on this one...

    3. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by goldspider · · Score: 1
      "If you like another mail program, DO A BOOK REVIEW ON THAT MAIL PROGRAM..."

      Wouldn't someone have to write a book about said alternative mail program before we can do a book review?

      --
      "Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
    4. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by fastdecade · · Score: 1

      You're right ---- sendmail can be very powerful and is not for newbies.

      The reason people complain about sendmail so vehemently is that standard distros seem to think it's funny to provide sendmail as the default. I know this is true for redhat and I suspect it follows for others(?). I doubt there would be as much frustration if a more admin-friendly package was offered as the default.

      For newbies, sendmail is an beast far too complex to bother with configuring. There are no decent GUI front-ends and the config files require compilation and are basically a complete mess.

      Changing the setup is hard enough - I dread to consider the possibility that someone might have to tune it. The topic certainly warrants a thick textbook.

      Personally, I agree with others here when it comes to your typical desktop linux setup:
      destroy sendmail and install Postfix or QMail.

    5. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by FreeLinux · · Score: 2

      As for sendmail, it is not meant for Windows weenies or wanna be Unix sysadmins, only for "real" Unix admins and those that wish to use a VERY robust product and are willing to learn the product to reap the rewards.

      Though your post overall, does have merit, I'd have to disagree with your arguement. I thought Sendmail was supposed to be an MTA, not an elitist's source of sadomasochism.

      When looking for an MTA I first look for something that is secure and something that works best. Then I look for an MTA that offers high performance. Never have I looked for or wanted ANY software package that was unnecessarily complex.

      That's a bit like learning assembly for the hell of it, even though you don't have any interest in programming.

    6. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Slashdot Logic 101:

      Red Hat, Sendmail == evil
      Mandrake, Postfix == holy

      If a fringe competitor to Apache ever surfaces, you can bet the 31337 slashdot d00ds will be all over it like a starving dog on a porkchop.

    7. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by zulux · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As for sendmail, it is not meant for Windows weenies or wanna be Unix sysadmins, only for "real" Unix admins and those that wish to use a VERY robust product and are willing to learn the product to reap the rewards.

      Are you kidding?

      I can get PostgreSQL to master/slave replicate a database cluster over 5 servers in faster time that I can get Sendmail do somthing simple. Really.
      The Sendamil config files might as well be binary - there useless to human eye. And, no, you shouldent have to learn a line-noise language just for a silly MTA.

      Sendmail is just a bitch. I had it's time in the sun, and it's time to move on.

      only for "real" Unix admins

      A 'real' Unix admin wants to get work done and learn somthing usefull. Managing Sendmail is just memorising a bunch of trivia about it and hoping it works as you think it should. Managing Postfix or Qmail is like managing any other decent Unix server - and by learning one of them you can take that knowlage and use it somewhere else.

      A 'real' Unix admin knows when a peice of software is a cobbled peice of crap and when to move on to somthing sane.

      --

      Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

    8. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then write a book on said alternative mail program. Bruce Perens mentioned the other day that he's looking for open source authors to add to his new book series.

    9. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Red Hat, Sendmail == evil
      Mandrake, Postfix == holy


      BZZZZZT!

      WRONG


      Mandrake, Postfix == gay

    10. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      not an elitist's source of sadomasochism

      no, that would be vi on hpux

    11. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The fact that a book for one of the alternative MTAs doesn't exist speaks clearly to me.

    12. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Getting a basic Sendmail config up and running from RPM, even for a newbie, is ubber easy. I mean it's not rocket science by any means. All that a newbie need do post-installation is edit 2 files. 2 files! That's not very damned hard, is it? They have to make a small addition to local-host-names and make add a couple RELAY lines to their access list. That's pretty damned easy if you ask me. Fools that's think the cf file needs to be edited should be drug from the terminals kicking and screaming and shot in the streets. I've been using Sendmail since '98 and wouldn't dream of using anything else. My configs are quite extensive and I have yet to edit a cf file (other than a minor change to the default submit.cf to change a path). The cf files are for gurus and no one else. You'd be a fool to edit them by hand.

    13. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by puppetluva · · Score: 3, Funny

      I can get PostgreSQL to master/slave replicate a database cluster over 5 servers in faster time

      I'm looking to do exactly that! How? (I'm not kidding) I'll trade you, you show me the replication trick and I'll show you how to do simple things with sendmail ;)

      /

    14. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by tigga · · Score: 2, Informative
      A 'real' Unix admin wants to get work done and learn somthing usefull. Managing Sendmail is just memorising a bunch of trivia about it and hoping it works as you think it should. Managing Postfix or Qmail is like managing any other decent Unix server - and by learning one of them you can take that knowlage and use it somewhere else.

      Wrongo here!
      I know both qmail and sendmail. With sendmail I can do almost everything I need. With qmail I have to search Internet for bits of information, patches and them write my own patches because of simple-minded approach of qmail author. A lot of corners were cut to make qmail faster - it made it very inconvenient to have it in production environment.

      Qmail just lacks flexibility...

    15. Re:What is with all the sendmail bashing? by Captain+Nitpick · · Score: 1
      As for sendmail, it is not meant for Windows weenies or wanna be Unix sysadmins, only for "real" Unix admins

      You know, any time I see something like this said about a piece of software, it makes me want to go running to their competition.

      --
      But then again, I could be wrong.
  16. Egads! by notque · · Score: 1

    "While I did not find it as much of a page turner as Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide."

    That's an unfair assessment. No book could compare.

    (I have attempted to read the Bat Book on numerous occations, only to be reminded that it's topic is actually sendmail.)

    --
    http://use.perl.org
  17. How to improve Sendmail performance. by AltGrendel · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    Use something else,

    ...like qmail or something.

    Ok, that could be considered a troll, but having worked with both, I really prefer qmail. It's smaller and I feel that its more robust than Sendmail. The fact that Sendmail is monolithic (one program does it all) where as qmail is modular makes it more secure too. A buffer overflow in one will not compromise the other modules. But no one has found a hack for qmail as yet.

    Just my 2 cents.

    --
    The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination

    - Douglas Adams

    1. Re:How to improve Sendmail performance. by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Informative
      The fact that Sendmail is monolithic (one program does it all) where as qmail is modular makes it more secure too.

      Since Sendmail hasn't been monolithic for a couple of versions now, have you considered switching back?

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    2. Re:How to improve Sendmail performance. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      , I really prefer qmail. It's smaller and I feel that its more robust than Sendmail.

      And it also has the added bonus of being assholeware! Submit to djb's will! Dare not to reconfigure the directory structure!

    3. Re:How to improve Sendmail performance. by benedict · · Score: 2

      And when was the last serious security problem in sendmail?
      There are a lot of wannabes going around repeating old news
      and thinking they're hip.

      --
      Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
    4. Re:How to improve Sendmail performance. by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      Yep. Sendmail isn't trendy or cool, so it's popular to talk about how terrible it is, regardless of whether the common complaints are still (or ever were) valid.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    5. Re:How to improve Sendmail performance. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Two months ago?

      http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2002-28.html

      Since the source at ftp.sendmail.org was trojaned that certainly counts.

      And exactly when was the last qmail-exploit, -bug or trojaned version?

    6. Re:How to improve Sendmail performance. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      are still (or ever were) valid

      oh, they were valid all right. ever heard of the wizard-mode security hole? that alone (admittedly it was a couple of years ago) is enough to scare me off from sendmail forever. i mean, eric allman wrote that crap, and he's still the sendmail master.

      i do have to admit the last bat book i have doesn't even cover m4 conf, so there's a good chance my opinion is obsolete by now. :)

    7. Re:How to improve Sendmail performance. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dare not to reconfigure the directory structure!

      LOL -- I dare.

      --- qmail-1.03/conf-qmail.orig Mon Jun 15 06:53:16 1998
      +++ qmail-1.03/conf-qmail Wed Dec 11 20:43:18 2002
      @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
      -/var/qmail
      +/opt/qmail/1.03

      This is the qmail home directory. It must be a local directory, not
      shared among machines. This is where qmail queues all mail messages.

      No question DJB is an asshole, but his software seems quite solid. And you can't really say it's hard to change the directory structure...

  18. why am i unsurprised by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    to hear a debian-using exim proponent CHORTLE?

  19. Re:Copy of the article in case it gets /.ed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    HELLO?!?! MCFLY?!?!

    Are you simple? The article *is* on Slashdot. If Slashdot gets Slashdotted, no one will be able to read you comment either, because it is *also* on Slashdot.

    More like posting as AC because you were too dense to distinguish the 'login' slashbox from the 'jennycam' slashbox.

  20. Large Canadian ISP is using it by haruchai · · Score: 3, Informative

    My former employer, AT&T Canada, who has over 150,000 home users and several thousand business
    clients, dumped their Sendmail-on-Solaris servers in favor of Postfix-on-FreeBSD and have never been happier.

    --
    Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  21. AMC Gremlin "Betty Boop" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hey man, don't "dis" the AMC Gremlin so quickly. Back in my hometown many years ago when I still was in high school, there was a locally famous AMC Gremlin street machine called the "Betty Boop". It was blue-ish grey in color and had the cartoon character painted on the upper rear quarter panels... similar to how WW2 fighter planes often had girls pained on them. Anyway, the "Betty Boop" had a souped-up 401 c.i. V-8 engine and she'd pull the front wheels off the ground a couple inches and run the quarter mile in the high 12's / low 13's on street tires. Not too shabby for a Gremlin.

  22. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  23. I would love to get sendmail running by rosewood · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I know sendmail is installed by default in redhat 8 and thats why I was going to use it. I also know that there are some other good options out there. However, sendmail seems to be the most widely used. That said, I thought it was really strange that I could quickly and easy get things like apache and mysql working yet I couldnt get sendmail working for basic pop3 and smtp access.

    That said, the other thing sendmail was lacking was something the entire linux world is lacking. Why is there no exchange server clone? Why is it that if I still want to share calenders and stuff in outlook, I still have to run Win2k Server + AD + Exchange Server? Thats just crazy. It blows my mind that there isnt an OSS option out there that does this type of work and is Exchange compatible!

    1. Re:I would love to get sendmail running by Ashurbanipal · · Score: 2

      Sendmail is an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) and thus does not need or want to speak POP3. In Red Hat (at least, versions up to 7.3) you need the ipop3d daemon for pop3.

      However, all POP protocols are brain-dead and lame. You should be using IMAP, which is supported by all decent end-user mailers (MUAs, or Mail User Agents) as well as by Microsoft's latest MUAs.

      In v5-7.3 RedHats, type ntsysv from the command line and turn on IMAP (or, better yet, IMAPS, if you comprendhez crypto) and SENDMAIL in the runlevel of your preference (I recommend 3, since Xwindows is bloated and unreliable).

      If you want an exchange server clone (NOTE: only really useful if you run Outlook, the world's absolute worst MUA for security and reliability, which runs only on proprietary opsystems that have high hardware requirements) use HP Openmail. Or wait for Miguel de Icaza to write something better.

      One thing to remember, regardless of what MTA you use, it should NOT relay Email from any address other than 127.0.0.1 unless you specifically configure in the addresses/domains you want to relay from. So you will need to edit /etc/mail/sendmail.mc, which contains useful comments. This is not a bug - MTAs that relay without requiring any user configuration are BROKEN.

      I ran 400 users on redhat5.2+sendmail+ipop3d server and win98+pegasus clients, the clients popped the mail server every 7 seconds, and the server was a pentium 133 with four ethernet cards on it. No performance problems in our real-world shop.

      For my users, reliability + performance = ability to generate profit = paychecks for workers. Features that cannot be obtained without sacrificing reliability or price/performance will not be implemented, because the goal is to earn enough to feed the kiddies, not to be 1337.

      All that being said, I recommend you install Postfix rather than sendmail. I use sendmail because I already know how to do it, and it works with OpenLDAP. I don't think you fit the profile.

  24. works for me.. by Nonillion · · Score: 1

    Look guys/gals, I have been using sendmail for years and I have had no problems with it that couldn't be solved by tweaking the config files. I like this hands on aproach because it gives me a chance to tinker with things..

    --
    "I bow to no man" - Riddick
    1. Re:works for me.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i've been using postfix for years. i like it because its high performance, high security, easily sources userlists from regex virtual domain files, db's ,etc., etc.

      and it give me the chance to tinker with OTHER things since i ___rarely___ have to mess with it.

      for all those people bashing people who are bashing sendmail for this book review remember who the target audience is:

      admins who (1) need an mta (2) don't have a full understanding of sendmail.

      as far as i know, thats exactly who needs to know about alternatives, and probably just about every slashdot reader out there.

  25. you fscking idiot.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just my $0.02 cents you can either have $0.02 or you can have 2 cents but "$0.02 cents" makes no sense.. why dont you lern how to spell you fscking insensitive clod..

  26. Here's how I'd describe it! by Ashurbanipal · · Score: 1
    how would you describe installing sendmail?
    rpm -ivh sendmail*rpm

    Works for more people than you might think... the rpm-based distros usually have sendmail configured to be reasonably useful right out of the box.

    To be fair, though, I have been running sendmail for almost ten years and it is definitely a bitch to configure for large non-standard environments. And what "large" computing environment is really "standard" if you look at it closely? M4 (sendmail.mc) is the best thing that ever happened to sendmail.
    1. Re:Here's how I'd describe it! by orangesquid · · Score: 1

      I like how Slackware does it even better; the setup program, when you install the sendmail package, lets you choose among a few different default configs that have never caused any problems for me.

      It seems everybody is always vouching for Qmail (or some other non-sendmail sendmail), but I have yet to see a thorough analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of both (or more) packages.

      --
      --TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
  27. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  28. The right tool for the right job. by abulafia · · Score: 2

    I have to disagree.

    Sendmail kicks ass.

    In a former life, I had to build a mailing list manager that handled content generation, sub/unsub, bounce management, etc. for a large number of mailing lists that had to do about 1.3 million messages in 4 hours.

    Without going through the whole set up, there were slave boxes that just delivered mail. They used pieces of postfix, which did a good job (I like postfix, BTW, my current company's primary mail server uses it).

    The primary machine used sendmail. Once you get over the horror of writing a .cf file, the flexibility, and tweakability of sendmail is astounding. Not everyone needs it, but when you do, sendmail rocks.

    A lot of people who don't really know what they're talking about rag on sendmail, echoing some very valid complaints that are mostly only of historical interest now. The most valid complaint these days is that it is arcane to configure. My take is, sure, it is, as it should be. Handling large volumes of email is second only to nntp for placing a heavy load on all sections of a network. If you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be doing it.

    I use postfix because it is easy now, we're only handling a few thousand messages a day.Should that change, I'm back with my old pal sendmail.

    --
    I forget what 8 was for.
    1. Re:The right tool for the right job. by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2
      The primary machine used sendmail. Once you get over the horror of writing a .cf file, the flexibility, and tweakability of sendmail is astounding. Not everyone needs it, but when you do, sendmail rocks.

      I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I'll say it again for good measure: I've never edited a .cf file in my entire life, but I've been able to pull some amazing functionality into an (easy-to-read) .mc file.

      Other than that, I agree with you. I use very few non-standard features in Sendmail. However, every time I've had some seemingly-bizarre need arise, it's been extremely comforting to find that Sendmail already incorporated the capability, and that I didn't have to replace my current working MTA with something else.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    2. Re:The right tool for the right job. by abulafia · · Score: 2

      We were doing some slightly bizarre things, in the way that only sites that are long lived and creative can become. One of my personal cliches is "backwords compatibitity with your company's code is your worst nightmare". Among other things, we were interoperating with a pile of code written by a departed contractor written in ADL. I am not making this up.

      My normal pattern was to hack the .cf until it did what I wanted, and turn that into something reasonably reasonable as a define statement, so that we could upgrade without losing hair or teeth.

      Don't get me started on when we had to hack the source to get something that would check a remote site for the existance of a given username... _that_ was bad.

      In any case, yes, sendmail has a long history of being inclusive, reasonable, and solid. I think people who badmouth it do so because they don't understand it.

      --
      I forget what 8 was for.
  29. Why use sendmail? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Because sendmail is incredibly powerful and flexible. In addition, the majority of complaints that have prompted people to use qmail no longer exist with sendmail. You'll in fact find that it can be extremely fast (LMTP, anyone?), very powerful (LDAP support, etc., etc.-- there's no end to the list), robust (extremely widely deployed and heavily tested), and quite secure. m4 is not hard to use, and sendmail is extremely well-documented and supported. Have you played with milter lately?

  30. Damn! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Had I known about that trick, I wouldn't have dumped Sendmail for Qmail back in '98.

  31. Not free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So you can't distribute forked versions or versions installed in weird places. You've still got the source, and you can distribute patches if you think you can outcode DJB. I really don't understand the non-free label attached to Qmail by some people. But then, I don't understand the same people screaming that Linux has to be called GNU/Linux, but GNU/HURD doesn't have to credit the Mach people. Get over it, Qmail is free, it runs on the Linux OS (and the *BSDs), it has human-understandable configuration, and it doesn't require the security patch du jour that Sendmail does. Just because something is GNU/Free doesn't mean it's good, and something that doesn't meet the GNU definition of "free" isn't necessarily bad.

    1. Re:Not free? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2
      So you can't distribute forked versions or versions installed in weird places.

      You mean, like, a version that installs binaries in /var? Oh, wait...

      I really don't understand the non-free label attached to Qmail by some people.

      You can't change it and restribute the modified version. Without that ability, how is it significantly different than the "freeware" that floated around on BBSes in the 80s and 90s?

      Just because something is GNU/Free doesn't mean it's good, and something that doesn't meet the GNU definition of "free" isn't necessarily bad.

      First, I never said a thing about GNU - I tend toward BSD, personally. Second, I made no judgement of its relative goodness or badness, which is entirely different from declaring it Free or non-Free. It may very well be a great program, but if it's not Free, then it's not useful for me in my applications.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  32. chlorophyl? more like borophyl by ipinkus · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    "The writing style and use of language was easy to read."

    Unlike this article... NEXT!

  33. It needs to be done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The bashing, that is. Sendmail is a big. bloated, incomprehensible security hole. It could have been written by MicroSoft. There's a lot of (much) better MTUs out there. Why tune a lumbering wreck when you can replace it with something that will run quicker and safer without tuning, and without requiring a half ton of books? If you can spend the time required to admin Sendmail and keep it patched and configured, good for you. But *real* Unix Sysadmins have better things to do with their time than to continually patch and upgrade what should be a trivial SMTP daemon. There's life outside the server room, ditch Sendmail and you'll find that out.

    1. Re:It needs to be done by jeremyp · · Score: 2

      You have no idea what you are talking about.

      What you describe is sendmail as it existed about 5 years ago. Any reasonably intelligent sysadm could get a simple sendmail config downloaded from the distro site and running in a couple of hours.

      The security problems are largely a thing of the past too. Apart from a couple of minor obscure and possibly unexploitable problems (and that embarrassing trojan in the build process), there have been no security problems with sendmail for years.

      Sendmail might not be the fastest, but how fast does your mail server have to be? I was able to get eight messages / second out of my G4 powerbook without any tuning whatsoever. This is not really a lot, but otoh represents nearly 30,000 messages per hour. How many do you get every day?

      --
      All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
    2. Re:It needs to be done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm handling around 250,000 emails a day on a Pentium MMX 200 running Qmail. That's inbound and outbound, POP accounts, forwards, etc. for about 150 domains. It was a piece of cake to set up, too. I got the bat book, I read it, the FAQs and mailing list archives until my brain hurt and my eyes bled, and sendmail was still an incomprehensible nightmare. I could give a shit if they've fixed it up, I learned to live without it and have no need or desire to ever use it again. Have they really plugged all the holes? I don't care, I won't use a Windozish program with non-human-readable configuration. And downloading a sample config from a distro is *not* being a "real Unix admin"

  34. More MaxRunnersPerQueue speeds sendmail by petej · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sendmail's default configuration is very conservative with respect to both your machine resources, and the resources of those with whom you exchange mail.

    Run sendmail with

    -o MaxRunnersPerQueue=10
    (or something bigger, if you want) and you can get past the biggest hurdle in sendmail performance -- by default, sendmail will handle all outgoing messages in a single queue. (Both qmail and postfix use multiple queues and/or runners by default.)

    Sendmail can relay messages without doing any disk I/O, thanks to the asynchronous I/O libraries; coupled with multiple queue runners, it's hard to get faster performance out of any MTA.

  35. Nice to see a positive review by bobcat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nick's book is very good, and he has managed to "give away" a lot of the tricks of the trade that are used by Sendmail, Inc. Professional Services.

    Sendmail (the app, not the company) scales quite nicely if you know what you are doing - I've installed sendmail on a couple of old dual-proc HP's and they handle about 2 million messages a day. Yes, that's right; 2 MILLION. It's a "simple" matter of tuning and knowing the file system.

    Don't hack the .cf directly. There be dragons there. Use M4.

    And, if another tool works better for you (exim, postfix, qmail) - use it! I don't always recommend sendmail, either.

    Bobcat

    disclaimer: I used to work for Sendmail, Inc. - my cubicle/cage was about 40 feet from where Nick used to sit...

    --
    -- Ziggy Sig Sig
  36. The first rule of Sendmail Performance Tuning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is you do not use Sendmail.

    ya, ya, cheap play on fight club line... but oh so true.

  37. Don't forget... by bani · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...racing stripes

  38. Good luck... by FuryG3 · · Score: 1

    Sendmail configs are so horribly retarded that it boggles the mind. For simple jobs, I use Postfix, and for more complicated tasks I use Exim.

    There are always special circumstances, especially with things that have been around as long as sendmail, when there is no alternative to complete a specific task, but I *never* have run into one (only heard about a couple).

    Use Exim, and trust Cambridge over Berkeley...

  39. My secret Red Hat sendmail trick. by emil · · Score: 3, Informative

    These days, Red Hat's default install of sendmail does not accept remote connections. Red Hat tells you to use M4 to generate a new CF file to enable this functionality.

    Here is what you really do...

    Find the line in the CF file that reads:

    O DaemonPortOptions=Name=MTA

    and change it to:

    O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=0.0.0.0, Name=MTA

    I picked this up from a bugzilla comment.

    1. Re:My secret Red Hat sendmail trick. by bruthasj · · Score: 2

      Bzzz. I just did this today. The easiest way is to find the line:

      DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')

      and then make it like this:

      dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')

      sendmail defaults to listen on every interface, that's why they have to explicitly restrict it to the loopback addr.

  40. Best thing I ever did was *de*tune sendmail by Ben+Jackson · · Score: 5, Informative
    I added:
    define(`confBAD_RCPT_THROTTLE',`1')dnl
    to my mc file. This causes (recent versions of) sendmail to add a short delay before responding to each bad recipient after the first one. The delay is hardcoded at 1 second (unfortunately) but I also changed the source to increase it to 10 seconds.

    You can run dictionary attacks against domains I handle mail for, but at least it will take you a damn long time! I just wish everybody was doing it. Eventually it would take too long to spam effectively.

    1. Re:Best thing I ever did was *de*tune sendmail by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 2

      Thanks for the pointer. Out of curiosity, though, wouldn't that potentially make connections last for hours? It's bad enough having a spammer eating my resources, but it may be worse to have them hanging out in my sockets table for days at a time.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    2. Re:Best thing I ever did was *de*tune sendmail by Ben+Jackson · · Score: 2
      It does make connections last for a very long time. That may be part of the reason why it only sleeps for 1 second (unless you hack it). sendmail does have a connection throttle so it won't eat your machine -- I forgot to mention that I ended up adding:
      define(`confMAX_DAEMON_CHILDREN',`64')dnl
      since the default limit was low enough that delayed clients were in the way of legitimate mail.

      I'm willing to put up with the resource drain in order to make it harder to spam in general. Sleeping for 10 seconds is nothing compared with spamassassin (gigantic regexps!) which has to run for all of the good recipients. My inbox alone got almost 10,000 junk messages in the 3 weeks around Christmas (about 2-3x normal volume). That sucked some serious CPU!

  41. Those who don't understand sendmail are doomed... by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...to repeat it.

    Um, wait. That didn't come out right.

    Sendmail is so bloated that it apparently takes books to get decent performance out of it.

    Seriously, a lot of people just don't understand sendmail and how difficult mail routing is. Sendmail is bloated because it tries to solve a very complex problem in an extremely diverse environment.

    Postfix was so easy to use, that I went from reading the man pages to a working system in one hour.

    Postfix and sendmail are going in two different directions. Sendmail == configurability, postfix == ease of use.

    Sendmail is fast. Not because there's a book on performance tuning does it mean the software is slow. Sendmail is probably as fast as anything else out there.

    Sendmail is configurable to no end. I run a sendmail setup with virtual domains, lots of address rewrite rules, spam filters. All my virtual users, and alias maps are in LDAP. I modify all my sendmail virtual users, virtual domains, aliases, etc through a PHP website. Try that with other mailers. They support LDAP, but they are no where as configurable as sendmail.

    Then try running these mailers on Linux, bsd, solaris, windows, AIX, etc., etc. No OS lock-in.

    Sendmail is well documented.

    The prevaling mood on /. these days seems to be if it's not brand new, get rid of it. That's unfortunate.

    --
    Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
  42. Courier by ansible · · Score: 2

    Yeah, I switched us to Courier recently.

    I was running qmail, but then needed an IMAP server. Courier-IMAP was the best for Maildirs. Then I needed a web mail server. Sqwebmail (part of Courier) was the best for Maildirs, and used the same subfolder format.

    Then I needed mail filtering, and wanted to use Maildrop because it works well with Maildirs. So I just bit the bullet and installed Courier.

    Had some initial issues with configuration setup, but after that it's run pretty smooth. Now I just need to get SpamAssassin installed (need a new version of Perl on the mailserver).

    Sendmail scared me off in the mid '90s. Haven't touched a .cf file since.

    1. Re:Courier by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am comfortable with Sendmail's tuning and configuration since mid 90's. But I switched to Courier as I think Maildirs format is the best: it makes mail server faster. Besides, I don't see any real progress in Sendmail development since mid 90's - especially in configuration, which format is obsolete and design isn't very good.

    2. Re:Courier by sholden · · Score: 2
      Now I just need to get SpamAssassin installed (need a new version of Perl on the mailserver).
      Your version of perl is over 4 and half years old?!?
    3. Re:Courier by sholden · · Score: 2

      Of course you are probably talking about spamd, in which case it's only a far more reasonable 2 years old...

    4. Re:Courier by ansible · · Score: 2

      Actually the mail server is OBSD 3.1. However, the Perl stuff on 3.1 doesn't include all the necessary libraries for SpamAssassin. When I tried installing them using CPAN, there was significant breakage. It could be I was doing something wrong.

      Haven't had the time to look into that again.

      I'd switch to OBSD 3.2, but the software RAID doesn't seem to work... Maybe now just wait for 3.3. and see how that goes.

  43. Coming soon... by metamatic · · Score: 1

    "Emacs Performance Tuning".

    --
    GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
  44. Re: OpenSource Free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The author does not want his core code to be modified so that he can "garuantee" its security (i.e. make sure your setup is his setup). It is not free in the sense that you cannot freely distribute modified versions of the source or binary--you can only distribute non-applied patches with the source.

  45. Qmail & LDAP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    These days, I'd say that LDAP is a pretty important thing for messaging agents to support-- to the point that it's really essential for deployment in many organizations.

    Although it's nice to know that those patches exist, they aren't AFAIK officially supported. I'd think that would seem to break qmail's much-lauded security model if they were used. Of course, the hole wouldn't be /in/ qmail...

    As far as I can see, the current version of qmail is 1.03. That version was released in 1998, /five years ago/. Messaging technologies have evolved quite a bit since then.

    Contrast this to sendmail. The current version is 8.12.7 as of today, and it was released on Dec. 29th (http://www.sendmail.org). It has engineers working on it full-time, and a lot of support and testing. Yes, there are also a lot of third-party patches.

    The bottom line is that sendmail is a modern MTA with modern features, not half as klunky as many posters seem to make it out to be-- I think they're suffering from qmail FUD perhaps?

  46. sendmail.cf humor by skookum · · Score: 1

    Well, I'm sure a lot of people have already read this. If not however, I offer The Case of the 500 Mile Email, a bizarre tale of debugging a sendmail problem.

  47. Re:Those who don't understand sendmail are doomed. by MattBurke · · Score: 1

    my last employer handled hundreds of thousands of email accounts through exim/ldap...

    however i find exim is difficult to set up (unless perhaps it's one of those things you've already done) to work in a simple sendmail-style virtusertable/aliases way.

  48. Ah..geeks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So self-righteous in their quest to be important or "skilled." Face it, you'd haul freight in a Yugo if someone told you it was "l33t".

  49. Sticking up for sendmail by AlfaGiik · · Score: 1
    I must admit that sendmail can be intimidating at first. When I first started doing UNIX administration, after feeling that NT was unfulfilling and looking for a better solution to some specific problems, I installed RedHat and gave it a try. The first thing I wanted to accomplish was to set up an email system. Since sendmail was there on the default install, that's what I learned. I looked on the web, did a little RTFM, and bought the 'bat book'. I was still frustrated and not getting much of anywhere. Then one day it happened. I don't know what triggered it, but it all became clear. It really ISN'T that hard. The only problem was that nobody explained it in any book or HOWTO with any clarity.

    Before you throw up your hands and try something else, read this. I wrote this to clarify the concepts behind sendmail, and SMTP in general and to offer come canned configs for new users. If you use my HOWTO, you will be up and running in under 10 minutes, even if you are an MCSE. You don't have to be a 31337 UN1X DuD3 or anything to figure it out.

    I have customers who run sendmail on very modest hardware that handle tens of thousands of messages per week for months on end with no attention required. I can do things that the other MTAs only wish they could do in their wettest dreams, even when installed on that old ProSignia sitting in the corner. Before you bash it, give it a try. If you still can't figure it out, send me an email.

  50. qmail - don't customise it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    It works out of the box (for some definitions of works - sending multiple messages to one MX for multiple recipients _is_ a massive waste of bandwidth and can be a DoS attack. Some people I've worked with on satellite links have had their costs blow out by factors of 300-400 thanks to list owners moving to qmail and there being a couple of hundred recipients on the receiving end, as a f'instance)

    If you have to tweak it, go find something else. Qmail is NOT DESIGNED.

    Where DESIGNED is in the engineering sense. Any changes are a kludge.

    Sendmail is big and hairy, but it's still the most flexible package available. If you don't need all that flexibility (like multiple gatewaying), fine, use postfix or exim, depending on if you need UUCP or email->fax, etc.

    Don't use Qmail for stuff it wasn't intended to do and avoid the DJB religious zealotry campaign.

    Don't bang in nails with a carpenter's plane either. It will work, but that's not what it's for.

  51. XMAIL by braek · · Score: 1

    I'm not trying to start a "my MTA is better than your MTA" war, but for those of you who
    are like me and got tired of trying to figure out sendmail, you should give XMAIL a shot
    It is both a SMTP and POP3 server, will soon support IMAP, and has been incredibly reliable and easy to
    set up for me, YMMV.

    1. Re:XMAIL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not only it is easier to configure through its network configuration protocol, but it's also more than twice faster.

  52. Rice-Boy! by pne · · Score: 2

    Sendmail as Rice-Boy -- what a concept :)

    --
    Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
  53. Kunta Kinte and Outlook by ckaminski · · Score: 1

    You mentioned a week or two back about working on an open source exchange mapi provider for outlook. Since this is the only way I can find to contact you, and I cannot find the original thread you posted, I would appreciate it if you could drop me a quick email at cfk@pobox.com. I don't know if you're interested in collaboration, but I've been starting some work on a similar project, and would rather assist someone else than duplicate effort (who needs another KDE/GNOME fiasco?).

    Thank you
    -Chris Kaminski