Re: Debian's mail daemons

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

Hi,

This discussion seems to keep getting side tracked with

  ``program X does not support feature Y''

type statements.

In the case of qmail at least, I'd just like to emphasise that every feature 
that I've wanted (or seen asked for on the qmail list), that is not explicitly 
included in qmail, can be reasonably easily implemented with other OS tools, 
and minor qmail configuration changes.

I take this as an indication that the design of qmail is fundamentally 
correct, and that the inclusion of these features into qmail itself would in 
fact just be creeping featureism.

The same goes for the claimed denial of service attack, which is really only a 
configuration/documentation problem.

Admittedly, qmail would benefit from a few more HOWTO type documents, but that 
is where Debian can come in, with packages for ezmlm, maildir2smtp and 
uucp4qmail for instance, and things in /usr/doc/qmail/examples.

Also admittedly, Dan Bernstein (djb) has a tendency to be rather blunt when 
writing to people with whom he disagrees, but this doesn't make any difference 
to the quality of qmail --- if anything it protects qmail from un-needed 
patches.

I think we should seriously consider using qmail as our default MTA.  It's 
only real weakness lies in it's documentation, and that should be reasonably 
easy to fix.

I think we should also consider switching to Maildir/ format for mail drops, 
since it seems to be the only way for delivering mail securely over NFS.

Cheers, Phil.

P.S. people who want to try qmail should probably get hold of version 1.01



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