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RE: Plausibility of sendmail?



As far as whether it gets in the cygwin distribution, it is primarily a
function of whether someone is willing to port it to cygwin and maintain it.
Otherwise, it won't.  Someone asks about sendmail for cygwin periodically
but I have never seen anyone express an interest in actually doing the port
and seving as maintainer. From what Brian Dessant says about the state of
the code base, it is pretty obvious why.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com [mailto:cygwin-owner@cygwin.com]On Behalf
> Of Brian Dessent
> Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 10:45 AM
> To: cygwin@cygwin.com
> Subject: Re: Plausibility of sendmail?
>
>
> Brian.Kelly@empireblue.com wrote:
>
> > >> If someone is crazy enough to want a production mailserver
> with Cygwin,
> > >> let them run Exim.
> >
> > Point well taken. Having limited experience with mail servers
> in general, I
> > will certainly keep your advice filed away in the ole noodle for future
> > reference. Of course a lot of reasons that *crap* persists is because
> > there's a lot of folks who are familiar with and experienced with such
> > *crap*. For someone under the gun to come up with a quick fix,
> inevitably
> > they will attempt to implement the familiar. If sendmail REALLY
> deserves to
> > die, then keeping it out of the Cygwin distribution is something I would
> > understand, and probably support (as long as there are advertised
> > alternatives of course!)
>
> Well, I don't see sendmail dying anytime soon.  It's still running on
> something like half of all mail servers, and I'm pretty sure it's still
> the #1 MTA.  But, it's decades old and has reams and reams of security
> bulletins, both past and present (and future!)  Security was just not
> such a concern back before The Internet existed, when ARPAnet and this
> new TCP/IP thing were all the rage.
>
> It's configured with a "sendmail.cf" file that closely resembles line
> noise and is so byzantine that it takes a 1232 page O'Reilly book to
> explain it.  It's rumoured that some sendmail developers don't even
> understand parts of the file.  The recommended advise is to never touch
> it, but instead edit the more friendly .mc file which is passed through
> a number of m4 macros to generate the .cf file.
>
> It sticks around due to legacy, as far as I can tell.  It "just works"
> at a number of places and nobody wants to be the person to rip it all
> out and install something else.  It also has support for some really
> anachronistic features (e.g. UUCP) that you likely won't find
> elsewhere.  It's probably got the worst performance of the "big four",
> but it can be made to do most of the things that you would ever want out
> of an MTA, and since it's so old everything's at least documented pretty
> well.
>
> So, if you use Webmin to configure it, and you stay up to date with your
> patches, and you aren't trying to run a whole enterprise's mail on a
> Pentium then it will probably work fine.  I suppose it would be unfair
> to call it crap, and you will always be able to find those who defend it
> with the same level of fanaticism as a heated vi-vs-emacs argument.  And
> to swing this back on-topic, I personally don't think it should be
> propagated to new places where it has yet to exist, such as Cygwin,
> especially when viable alternatives already exist there.
>
> Brian
>
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