Re: Sendmail or Qmail ? ..
I wrote:
>> Unfortunately, [Qmail's] not being maintained by its
>> author.
I've also used [PM]MDF and Smail. Their authors bailed, too.
I've used Slackware's and SuSE's Sendmail on personal systems,
but never for anything other people were depending on.
W.D. McKinney top-posted:
>I know of several "big" mail servers running qmail and the sys admins
>don't have the same viewpoint that you do. That doesn't make you wrong
>or them wrong though.
We're both right. Qmail meets my needs on my personal systems,
where I don't need authentication out of a database or
SMTP AUTH or milters or mailing lists with Web interfaces.
But Exim would work, too, and Debian installed it for me.
Big ISPs have software release processes and software quality
assurance staff. A crew like that, if they use Qmail, is
responsible for knowing which of the patches at qmail.org are
crap and which ones work, and how to use them.
They can take patches that almost work, and debug them.
They don't release "packages," they release *disk images* to
production, and get evaluated on their correctness.
Qmail meets their needs, too.
My servers are in between. Too important for "seems to work"
hobby maintenance, too small to afford a professional software
staff to debug contributed patches. I *don't know* if
I applied a poorly documented qmail.org patch correctly,
or whether I configured the resulting setup in ways the patch's
author anticipated and tested. When I "google" for comments on the
various patches, I don't know whether the commenters are using a
system like mine, or one more like the patches' authors'.
I need a complete MTA that's being actively maintained by a team
who *work together*. Not a collection of patches each of whose
status is unknown.
That's why I'm not installing Qmail any more.
Cameron
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