Re: [tlug] mail server recommendations

[Matt Doughty <mdoughty@example.com>]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 03:28:44PM +0900, Brett Robson wrote:
> 
> >     Brett> I'd like to go with the most popular mainly to develop
> >     Brett> useful skills. Unless someone can give a good reason not to
> >     Brett> I'll go with the most popular.
> >
> > Sendmail is probably most common, but decidedly unpopular. ;-)
> >
> 
> Thanks, I actually meant most common and realised afterwards I should have
> said so. Think I will at least look at sendmail.
> 

May I reiterate, Steve is, as usual, dead on balls accurate[1]. I have 
touched or admined all of the usual suspects, qmail not withstanding.
Sendmail is a beast that happened as opposed to being developed. It
first showed its ugly head circa 1983, and has gotten bigger and 
cruftier every year since. It has support for everything because it
was around for and therefore had to support every misbegotten
mail system/standard/protocol to ever see the light of day.  Many of those 
'standards' have been forgotten but the support remains in sendmail, a 
historical record if you will. Here is a piece of advice, learn postfix, 
dabble in qmail, play around with Exim, and then give sendmail the go round.
Take the bat book home[2] and figure out how to build a config file for
m4 so you can generate a config file for sendmail[3].  Figure out what
aliases, mailertable, access etc. are for, learn all the needed command line
options, and then run before you wake the beast that is sendmail.  Pray you 
never have to dig into the madness that is sendmail.cf[4] as long as you live.

--Matt

[1]. yes that is a technical term.

[2]. followed by a visit to the doc for that lower back strain.

[3]. the need for a script file just to build sendmail.cf never ceases
     to amaze me.

[4]. I wonder if you get cthulhu mythos for looking at those recipes?
     If you don't you should.