Re: next Beta

[Gordon Messmer <yinyang eburg com>]

On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Wil Cooley wrote:

> Since it looks like we're making a wishlist and breaking things,
> here's mine:
> 
> 	o Postfix instead of Sendmail (Which the headers show you use
> 		internally)
...
> 	o Dump UW-IMAP for Cyrus or Courier or ANYTHING ELSE.

Or... you could switch the whole mess over to Courier MTA, which provides
SMTP, POP, IMAP, SSL for everything, Maildir's, MySQL support, PostgreSQL
support, LDAP support, mail list manager, and calendaring.  It's smaller, 
faster, more secure and more reliable than sendmail/procmail/uw-imap. Its 
API for external modules and filters is absolutely wonderful.  Of course, 
it's also GPL.

I suppose that I don't need to say that I'm sold on Courier, but I did all 
the same.  My last job as a sysadmin landed me running sendmail on a 
slackware Linux (kernel 2.0) box.  It was an absolute nightmare.  
Mailboxes got corrupted because Slackware provides pretty much everything 
in the default configuration, and procmail defaults to using lockf and 
flock, which doesn't work under Linux 2.0.  The filesystem was getting 
corrupt as often as once a day (!!) for who-knows-what-reason.  Could have 
been the concurrent writes, AFAIK.  Customers were loosing mail, and 
reliability was aweful.  I recently moved to Seattle and took another 
sysadmin position to find that they were running the same damn software 
(SlackWare, Linux 2.0, sendmail w/ procmail) and were having the same damn 
problems.  We migrated to qmail at my last position, and are moving to 
Courier at this one.

What was I talking about, again?  Oh! Yeah... cast my vote for scrubbing 
sendmail and co. from our lovely distro like mildew from the walls of our 
baths.  If I knew that Red Hat had an official request line, I (and I'm 
sure many others) would have been all over this a long time ago.  It seems 
to me that replacing sendmail as the default MTA is the most frequently 
requested change.  Shouldn't Red Hat's Linux distro reflect the needs of 
its users?  :)

-- 
If I had a dollar for every brain that you don't have,
	I'd have one dollar. - Squidward to SpongeBob