Sendmail 8.10 Public Beta Released

Charles Ying writes "sendmail.net is reporting that Sendmail 8.10.0 Beta has been released to the public. The Sendmail Consortium hopes to get more wide spread testing from the open source community. Sendmail 8.10 has a lot of new features such as IPv6 support, SMTP AUTH, multiple mail queues, improved anti-spam capabilities, and updated LDAP support. "

Comments

Re:sendmail.cf ?

[KmArT]

Sendmail seems to generate a lot of hate and a lot of love, from its detractors and supporters, respectively. How many of those who use qmail have ever setup and administered a sendmail install? And how many sendmail admins have ever setup and used a qmail install? Both have their pros and cons. Both were designed differently - one came from way back in the day when the world was a bit freer (as far as computer security goes) and as a result, its had many exploits. I don't think that Eric Allman will ever suggest that sendmail was coded with security first in mind (and thats no excuse for not being secure). Because of that, the sendmail approach has been to add new features, patch bugs, and end up with a MTA that can do anything (but is bloated).

There are somethings that sendmail, because of its "bloated" quality can do well. Ever try to do mail via BITNET or UUCP with qmail? Probably not - I'm not sure it can be done. But sendmail has hooks for those mechanisms.

Qmail is (argueably) easier to install, has a nice mailing list manager and IT WAS DESIGNED WITH SECURITY IN MIND. Sendmail wasn't. Thats not excusing its security holes - its just noting that the environments that shaped the two MTA is different. And perhaps its time to move away from a MTA that was designed wrong from the start. But you can disable alot of the unneeded features of sendmail if you want.

This is a near religous war (akin to emacs vs. vi). But for those of you who argue that sendmail has a difficult config file - have you ever read the README files on how to set it up? I'm working on installing a new mail server now, built around the Cyrus IMAP package and sendmail 8.9.3. Compiled Cyrus and supporting libraries (libsasl) on Tuesday and got it running. Compiled sendmail yesterday - install BerkeleyDB 2.77, got sendmail source, uncompressed and untarred, cd sendmail-8.9.3/src, ./makesendmail to generate Makefile, edit Makefile to point to Berkeley db stuff, make, make install, cd ../../cf/cf, create a 10 line .cf file, m4 miconfig.mc > sendmail.cf, HUP it and I have a MTA that hands off everything but a few local accounts (like root) to cyrus. Its got antispam features out of the box, it uses LDAP, its reasonably fast, and I did it in my spare time - cyrus install was about one hour and sendmail was about the same (less if you don't count the interruptions).

All the sendmail.cf file amounts to is an expansion of a ton of m4 macros. The .cf files are not difficult to generate at all - like I said, ten lines and I have a fully functional mail server. I don't profess to know what all the rules do - but I don't necessarily have to - it works.

Re:sendmail.cf ?

[Evangelion]

I'm not saying sendmail is a bad program because of that but I do think its a major part which could be changed in order to make it a little more userfriendly.

Being an end user I really saw no need to use a full blown mailserver which is capable to support a company with over 2000 employees

Sendmail is not about 'positive user experience'. It's about dealing with mail. Those who actually have to deal with sendmail (i.e. Unix network admins) are likely not too concerned about how much of a positive user experience they're getting from thier config files. They're most likely worried about whether or not Mr. Dumbass Veepee will be able to send mail.

It's not a user's program.

Re:sendmail.cf ?

[Tet]

But the program which actually scared me off due to its allmost unreadeble configuration file has allways been sendmail.

Which configuration file would that be? sendmail.cf? Even Eric Allman (author of sendmail) says he treats sendmail.cf as a binary file. Stick to the M4 files that are used to generate sendmail.cf and you'll be fine. They're certainly readable.