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Something that has surprised me in the free unix world is the ongoing strong support and emphasis on sendmail. I notice openbsd highlights updates in its releas

by cturner 16y ago

Something that has surprised me in the free unix world is the ongoing strong support and emphasis on sendmail. I notice openbsd highlights updates in its releases also. I don't know much about MTAs. From what I read, sendmail has a bad reputation for being complicated and unwieldy. I've played around with it a little and found it cryptic. But mail systems seem to be inherently complicated, so maybe sendmail attracts a lot of criticism that could is in fact only slightly less true of all programs of that sort. What's the thinking about ongoing strong support for sendmail?

jolan 16y ago
sendmail has a BSD-compatible license and other MTAs don't. postfix's license has some weird clauses due to IBM. Exim is GPL. There is ongoing work in OpenBSD on "opensmtpd": http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/smtpd/ http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/smtpd/
- beagle3 16y ago
  qmail has been placed in the public domain a few years ago.
  - jolan 16y ago
    And development on it stopped a few years ago as well.
magv 16y ago
Aside from the license issue, it also helps that the guy who maintains Sendmail in the FreeBSD sources is Gregory Neil Shapiro, vice president and CTO of Sendmail Inc.
deleted 16y ago
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