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> Somebody copy pasta the "so you think you can fix email, this is why your idea won't work" thing The author in this case has also written what was for some d
by throwanem 5y ago
> Somebody copy pasta the "so you think you can fix email, this is why your idea won't work" thing
The author in this case has also written what was for some decades one of the better MTAs you could run, namely qmail. Granted, I've always despised it for its hostility to administrators not named Daniel Bernstein, and ran Postfix instead for all 17 of the years I spent administering my personal mail hosts. I don't like djb's style, either, and while we've never directly interacted I strongly suspect we would not get along at all. But none of that changes the fact that djb did in fact fix a lot of what was wrong with email, by providing an alternative that at the very least was both a lot faster and a lot more secure than sendmail, back when good alternatives to sendmail were pretty hard to come by.
He's certainly not always correct, but he is at least always worth listening to.
- geocar 5y agoI think all of that is fair, except perhaps for the characterization: A lot of sysadmins liked the djb way too. It's 2022 and I still prefer daemontools to systemd and multilog to syslog; I chain lots of little unix programs instead of writing big honking super-servers all the time. I use cdb and fghack-like tricks a lot. And we still feel the pain of fhs... And who knows, you might agree more now that he's changed some too: After ten years of qmail[1], his list of "distractions" is remarkably reflective, and he seems quite willing to admit some of the contortions he did (and put us users through!) to get privilege separation, or to annoy attackers (and the users!) didn't gain anything at all and cost much. [1]: https://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf https://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf
- throwanem 5y agoThanks for linking that! There's a lot of good analysis in there, and it does indeed ameliorate my opinion somewhat.