why sendmail and not postfix?

[Brian Fahrlander]

On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 05:09, Fulvio wrote:
> why sendmail and not postfix?

    Ya know, it's probably because of legacy issues.

    Sendmail uses old-style mailboxes which are just long, flat text
files.  This is fine unless you have 10,000 messages to go through, and
I'm convinced that that's why Postfix/Exim/etc were created.

    Postfix stores emails in a one-email, one-file arrangement.  It's
still early enough in the development of such apps that, in order to
work with these emails, your app has to be Postfix-aware.

    But in the big picture, it comes out to a dead-heat.  Sendmail has
more flexibility than any on the planet...and you pay for that with the
cryptic M4 and all that stuff.  But, if you're running a massive site
like Yahoo or similar, Sendmail not only holds up under the load, but
allows you to interface to legacy systems with AX.25 and UUCP and so on.

    The Sendmail that comes on Redhat/Fedora is very easy to set up as
long as you ensure:

    1. Your DNS is set up properly. No fiddling with aliases or calling
the machine things it's not.  Sendmail needs to look up the site in DNS
and have the name returned to make sense.

    2. As long as you're only using TCP/IP (aka 'the internet') there's
nothing to set up.  If you're using another connection type like
uucp/ax.25/etc get out the book.

    3. Redhat/Fedora makes the important step of disabling Sendmail by
way of the daemon-line so you don't set it up without configuring it and
becoming your town's main hub of spam.  Change "127.0.0.1" to the IP
address it's listening on, restart it, and you're ready to go.

    I, too, used to think Sendmail was merely complicated and not worth
the trouble, but it can do a lot of neat things...and it's older than
Bill Gates....AND me.  And it works.

    Enjoy.

-- 
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Brian Fahrländer                 Researcher, Conservative, and Technomad
Evansville, IN                                     http://Fahrlander.net
ICQ  5119262
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