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Postfix: A Secure and Easy-to-Use MTA
BSD Forums writes "On March 3rd, 2003, Internet Security Systems, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, issued a warning regarding a hole found in Sendmail. The warning, echoed by CERT, warned system admins that any version lower than 8.12.8 was vulnerable to a serious root exploit. Sendmail has a long history of security holes, most of which have been thoroughly documented on security sites. While Sendmail runs half the mail servers in the world, there are smaller and easier-to-use mail transfer agents (MTAs). Network administrator Glenn Graham demonstrates how Postfix gives you most of the power with a fraction of the pain."
Does postfix have milters? Sendmail is popular for a reason.
...because the article poster had to mention Postfix. Now someone's gonna say "qmail", someone else will say "exim", someone will say "fuck you, sendmail all the way" and what could have been a nice debate about the full-of-security-holes-dinosaurs of open source will be spent in 500 messages worth of flamewar. Sigh.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
As for myself, I switched to postfix several years ago and haven't looked back even once.
Harald
What can you do with sendmail that you can't to with qmail? There is a a very large set of mature additions and patches to qmail that permit just about anything you may wish to undertake with your mail server.
On the point of qmail being cumbersome: I disagree - what could be simpler than adding a single line to your rcpthosts file? Maintaining qmail is trivial. However, I'll agree that the author's terse documentation makes it seem quite foreign but compared to sendmail it is positively didactic. There are also many other resources available which supplement the original docs.
I've considered qmail a few times, but Dan is such an abrasive prick that I just couldn't bring myself to use his software (the same can be said of Theo and OpenBSD). Check back through the qmail archives for some of his abusive responses to participants in the various qmail lists. Wietse, on the other hand, is easy to get along with, fixes things in a timely manner and operates in a much more respectful manner. Postfix is simple, secure, and well supported. Also, it doesn't require that you install all the author's other tools in order to have a functioning MTA.
qmail is supposedly very secure in its default state. Aren't you compromising that security when you add third-party patches? I would think that these patches, since they are not part of qmail proper, have received nowhere near the scrutiny that sendmail (or postfix, exim, etc.) have received. Doesn't that defeat the main reason for using qmail?
OLPC Australia
Is this the same Department of Homeland Security that recently signed a contract with Microsoft to provide their software? And they're complaining about Sendmail?
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http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/16/163
On the other hand, maybe they'll train their sights on BIND next.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Compare this to the antics of "that corporation" who is quite content to leave bugs as "undocumented features". Could be this FUD is just a reaction to that "insecure by design" mudslinging.