Re: Sendmail vs Exim vs Others
Adam Aube wrote:
I've added patches for various purposes, but not for security. What
security problems were you patching against?
I consider fundimental checks against spam and viruses to be part and
parcel to security.
What "idiotic" ideas? qmail is designed to be secure, fast, and simple -
and it achieves those goals quite well.
Prime example: Exim logs all activity with a message by a unique
identifier assigned to that message. No message passing through Exim will
ever have the same identifier. Therefore it is trivial to track down the
entire history of a message through any number of logs.
QMail assigns the message's INode as the identifier. INodes are reused.
Therefore it is a non-trivial matter to track down what a message has gone
through since one has to first find the message number, then track that number
until a successful delivery attempt is made. Mind you each delivery attempt
is given a different identifier as well and has no reference to original
identifier! Once a successful delivery attempt is made all future references
to that message *may* be invalid.
That has been a major thorn in my side for weeks because I cannot perform
a simple freakin' grep to get the history of a single message! If I did I'd
see it pop up several dozen times as the same INode is reused over and over.
Of course logging isn't the only problem with this concept. Try moving
the queue. I dare ya!
Simplistic design, yes. Simple, as in to use? No way. *BASIC*
operations like logging and queue maintenance required tools to be written.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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