Why is sendmail bad?

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 11:45:15AM -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> There seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction with sendmail in the call to 
> replace it with Exim or Postfix, but I didn't see any specifics about why 
> people object to it. Anyone care to give details?

Most of the discusion has been about what should be the default.  For "newbies"
sendmail can be a pain to configure.  It's documentation leaves something to be
desired, and the default sendmail.cf file isn't all that helpful.

That's not to say that sendmail isn't useful or does't work properly.  It does.
But if a package is going to be the default for a distribution, it should also
be fairly simple for new users to configure and adapt to.

> 
> I'm using sendmail together with MIMEDefang to run SpamAssassin and ClamAV 
> against messages during the SMTP transaction so that I can reject obvious 
> spam and viruses before they're committed to a queue. MIMEDefang uses a 
> user-edited Perl script to establish the exact rules for acceptance, making 
> the system very flexible. How hard is that to set up in Postfix or Exim?

I haven't looked at postfix yet (will tonight maybe), but for exim all one has
to do is uncomment one line in the default config file once spamassassin and a
virus checker are installed.  Very easy.

josh