9 ms·

Mail: Make The Dragonfly Mail Agent (dma) the default mta

120 points by rfmoz 4y ago

ilyt 4y ago
I'm more surprised they still used sendmail, most of the other distros moved away from that... abomination in every respect decades ago. I still remember fun of setting it up then migrating to qmail (which was also ...interesting to setup)
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Sendmail, as configured & documented in FreeBSD, is very easy to set up for really simple use cases. Or to disable. For more complex use cases - it's kinda obvious that they expect ~everyone to install their favorite MTA and use that. I'd guess that sendmail is still there because they could never agree on which replacement for it was "the best".
- crest 4y ago
  The "real" sendmail hasn't been the base system one for ages. The sendmail in the base system ist only a fairly minimal configuration used for local mail delivery (cron, sudo, etc.). The reason it took so long is that there was no consensus on what should succeed sendmail as the default mailer. There are several mail transfer agents just one pkg install away (Postfix, exim, OpenSMTPd, (newer) DMA, ssmtp, msmtp, etc.).
bell-cot 4y ago
...as the default MTA, in FreeBSD 14.0, which is scheduled to be released in July 2023. The currently-supported production versions are 12.3 and 13.1. Which are scheduled to be replaced by 12.4 (Dec'22) and 13.2 (Mar'23).
josteink 4y ago
I remember trying to setup sendmail 15-20 years ago, and it was a horrendous experience. Seeing this news reminds me of an old quote (which I cannot find a direct reference to at this point): "There is nothing in human experience when compared to setting up a sendmail config-file which can be considered hard." Based on this move, I guess this means sendmail haven't really improved much in that regard since, and most people just avoiding it for that reason? I guess... Good riddance, then?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  The thickest, heaviest and least used old book I keep by the door for battering intruders is O'Reilly "Sendmail". It taught me one important thing; that the elegance and reliability of any program is inversely proportional to the size if the configuration guide.
- darrenf 4y ago
  Sendmail as Turing machine: https://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/sendmail-as-turing-machine.txt https://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/sendmail-as-turing-machine...
linsomniac 4y ago
This is your sendmail therapy thread. Relate how sendmail scarred you here. :-)
- _joel 4y ago
  No, no, don't, I repressed those memories and don't want them to resurface! :D
- thiagocsf 4y ago
  Sendmail made me think everything in Unix was so scary and esoteric.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    sendmail and bind :)
    - raffraffraff 4y ago
      Shudders. The LPIC exams I took back in 2005 made me think I would spend the next 20 years in vim manually configuring apache, sendmail, bind, openldap and a bunch of other stuff I haven't touched since the exam.
  - doubled112 4y ago
    I never did get used to running make on my config files. Or the pain of somebody on the team routinely editing the output files without making the changes on the config files, and never knowing whether it'll work the same when you're done.
    - toast0 4y ago
      > I never did get used to running make on my config files. I worked in a very Make oriented place. If you need to do any processing on files, which not only includes compiling them, but also pushing them to other servers, and loading them into memory on those servers, that should be done with Make. Because Make makes things :) Now I'd rather write a Makefile than use whatever language's builder of the week. Make can make things, why do I need anything else?
rasengan 4y ago
I respect sendmail. Obviously there are other MTAs like djb’s Q mail, postfix as well as newer ones written in Go and Rust. Sure sendmail has had its share of vulnerabilities. But it’s the falls it suffered that made every other MTA strong. Let’s respect the software of the past. It’s the past’s software that built today’s software.
- grvgr 4y ago
  The future does build on the past. Here's a nugget from Andrew Lee aka rasengan's past: https://gauravgiri.com/for-the-record/a.bad.habit.pdf https://gauravgiri.com/for-the-record/a.bad.habit.pdf And his future: https://twitter.com/grvgr/status/1586942591249141762 https://twitter.com/grvgr/status/1586942591249141762
- jsrcout 4y ago
  Agree. The hardest thing in the world (besides configuring sendmail) is to remember that other peoples' use cases are not necessarily my use case. The world of email was a whole lot different back when sendmail was created. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#History
  - zokier 4y ago
    > The world of email was a whole lot different back when sendmail was created. Sure, email in 80s was different than in the 90s. The problem with sendmail is that it didn't get replaced when it really wasn't a good fit anymore and instead it got dragged on for extra 30 years.
- pjc50 4y ago
  No. Let it die and stand over the grave to make sure it stays dead. Even 20 years ago there were better alternatives; Debian sensibly defaulted to Exim. It's always been a horrendously difficult to configure monolith.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > But it’s the falls it suffered that made every other MTA strong. Worth remembering that Sendmail was, generally speaking, first. Shoulder of giants and all that.
FrostKiwi 4y ago
Really happy to see this cross-pollination in BSD land. Not just DragonFlyBSD getting packages via DeltaPorts, but FreeBSD also getting updates from DragonFly.
- stock_toaster 4y ago
  Maybe someday npf will be ported to FreeBSD from NetBSD too. I can hope.
  - anecdotal1 4y ago
    Can it outperform IPFW?
  - cpach 4y ago
    Is it not enough with pf, ipfw and ipfilter? (^_^)
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      Maybe the movies and "he hacked through four firewalls!!!" are correct after all.
      - cpach 4y ago
        Haha! Maybe (:
puyoxyz 4y ago
End of an era
- ruslan 4y ago
  Previous EoE was when they removed UUCP. PS. I use uucico to automate some offline factory processes for 25+ years.
jabl 4y ago
I've been using dma for some Linux servers in a simple 'smart host only' configuration (that is, all mail is forwarded to some central 'real' MTA), mostly in order to deliver mails from cron. As the commit message notes, DMA is not a full-featured MTA like sendmail or postfix, but rather a minimalistic MTA. Makes sense to have as the default one; those who have a need for a 'real' MTA can install and setup such a thing.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  In hindsight, one can wonder why it's not the default behavior everywhere. After all, most systems need some form of mail, but only basic. The rest can install a fully-featured version easily. It's a win-win situation: increased security for those who don't need a fully-featured MTA and the rest doesn't lose anything.
  - jabl 4y ago
    > In hindsight, one can wonder why it's not the default behavior everywhere. Nowadays most Linux distros don't install any MTA by default. Which I think is an entirely valid choice, considering home users, laptop warriors etc. that don't run any services (for the external world) on the machine, and setting up even a simple smarthost type configuration requires putting in some config data during the installation process.
    - zokier 4y ago
      To me the olden way of every server running some email daemon in the background always felt so weird; the only purpose seemed to be a black hole for a things like sudo and cron write their messages to, something surely a simple log file would have sufficed for.
      - SoftTalker 4y ago
        It saves having every program that might want to send mail from requiring configuration.
      - 4y ago
nix23 4y ago
Oh yes!! That is the right decision!! And maybe also change NTP to DNTPD or NTPsec..maybe?
ysleepy 4y ago
Finally. For, well, decades, the first thing I added to my rc.conf was sendmail_enable=NONE. I think local email is dumb in general though.
ruslan 4y ago
Really bad news! Please keep sendmail default MTA!
- nix23 4y ago
  Why? But anyway, you can install it from ports if you wish ;)
  - ruslan 4y ago
    Of course I can, I can even compile it from source codes, which I sometimes do. :) I use FreeBSD for decades and sendmail was my number one and the only choice of MTA all that time. Not only mine, but all others FreeBSD users I know too. I don't get why would something that works excellent should be changed to something that, well, is just a dummy ? I love sendmail. I think I can cook it quite well, and I don't get why I should change my habits. Not changing habits is one of the major reasons I use FreeBSD these days. Otherwise I would switch to Linux long time ago. Now FreeBSD made one more step towards its death. If someone has prejudice against sendmail adding sendmail_enable="NONE" in rc.conf is easy.
    - nix23 4y ago
      I cant even argue about that mentality of beein so against changes. It's for sending emails...gosh...have you said the same about the git change? Btw if you just used sendmail..always..my condolences.
      - ruslan 4y ago
        Git is so recent comparing to Sendmail. I began using Git for my projects just a couple of years ago. I was die-hard CVS user, switching to Git was a pain for me. Now with Git I've had to employ Linux best practice - update everything once a month or so, which often leads to compatibility problems that have to be resolved. This all eats quite a lot of time, unfortunately.
        4y ago
monotux 4y ago
To be fair, dma has been in the base system for a long time. Now (well sometime in the future) I can remove half of my Ansible role for setting up dma on my systems, just skipping disabling sendmail. I learned about dma here, a great blog btw! https://jpmens.net/2020/03/05/simple-solution-for-outgoing-mail-from-a-freebsd-system/ https://jpmens.net/2020/03/05/simple-solution-for-outgoing-m...
anthk 4y ago
A good step in the right direction. FreeBSD has bad defaults, but I hope they can fix them one step at a time.
ape4 4y ago
Are there Linux packages? I'd rather not compile from source since you don't get updates. Thx.
- nix23 4y ago
  Yes, at least for Arch and Debian (the only two i searched for)
rfmoz 4y ago
Maybe a coincidence, but Eric Allman is the developer of Sendmail [1] and the spouse of Marshall Kirk McKusick, one of the long-serving board members that left the FreeBSD Foundation this summer [2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Allman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Allman [2] - https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/foundation-elects-new-officers-interviews-outgoing-board-members/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/foundation-elects-new-off...
- nix23 4y ago
  It's especially funny that Marshall said never tell anyone that your are good at writing drivers or sendmail-configuration because that will be your life's destination then ;)
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Heh, similar to "never let your coworkers know you are good with Excel". Or, in non-tech offices, never let anyone know you understand technology at all. I wonder if there's a name for that general sentiment, and how far back comments on that sort of thing go.
    - a1369209993 4y ago
      "The reward for a job well done is usually another job to do. Remember that if you're ever tempted to do a good job of something thankless and unpleasant."
    - toast0 4y ago
      I interviewed somewhere without a resume, because of a referral, but the CEO asked me what I did, so I started at the beginning without thinking... 12 years before I started there, I had worked at a rinky-dink ISP, and before that I did IT at a school district as a student worker.... guess who got to configure mail and manage the domains and own the GSuite account. Bah
- loeg 4y ago
  McKusick is also known for the filesystem (FFS / UFS). The use of sendmail in FreeBSD isn't exactly a coincidence -- it, too, was developed at Berkeley in the 70s and 80s. And it's probably unsurprising that people meet other people living and working in the same place (grad school).
mnd999 4y ago
I’ve been doing this on my FreeBSD boxes for a while. Great move.
deck4rd 4y ago
I'm a fan of msmtp for this sort of "lightweight" mail sender, since I really only need it for cron notifications and a few hacky scripts. Maybe I'll give dma a spin.

120 points by rfmoz 4y ago

ilyt 4y ago

I'm more surprised they still used sendmail, most of the other distros moved away from that... abomination in every respect decades ago. I still remember fun of setting it up then migrating to qmail (which was also ...interesting to setup)

bell-cot 4y ago
Sendmail, as configured & documented in FreeBSD, is very easy to set up for really simple use cases. Or to disable. For more complex use cases - it's kinda obvious that they expect ~everyone to install their favorite MTA and use that. I'd guess that sendmail is still there because they could never agree on which replacement for it was "the best".
crest 4y ago
The "real" sendmail hasn't been the base system one for ages. The sendmail in the base system ist only a fairly minimal configuration used for local mail delivery (cron, sudo, etc.). The reason it took so long is that there was no consensus on what should succeed sendmail as the default mailer. There are several mail transfer agents just one pkg install away (Postfix, exim, OpenSMTPd, (newer) DMA, ssmtp, msmtp, etc.).

bell-cot 4y ago

...as the default MTA, in FreeBSD 14.0, which is scheduled to be released in July 2023. The currently-supported production versions are 12.3 and 13.1. Which are scheduled to be replaced by 12.4 (Dec'22) and 13.2 (Mar'23).

josteink 4y ago

I remember trying to setup sendmail 15-20 years ago, and it was a horrendous experience. Seeing this news reminds me of an old quote (which I cannot find a direct reference to at this point): "There is nothing in human experience when compared to setting up a sendmail config-file which can be considered hard." Based on this move, I guess this means sendmail haven't really improved much in that regard since, and most people just avoiding it for that reason? I guess... Good riddance, then?

nonrandomstring 4y ago
The thickest, heaviest and least used old book I keep by the door for battering intruders is O'Reilly "Sendmail". It taught me one important thing; that the elegance and reliability of any program is inversely proportional to the size if the configuration guide.
darrenf 4y ago
Sendmail as Turing machine: https://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/sendmail-as-turing-machine.txt https://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/sendmail-as-turing-machine...

linsomniac 4y ago

This is your sendmail therapy thread. Relate how sendmail scarred you here. :-)

_joel 4y ago
No, no, don't, I repressed those memories and don't want them to resurface! :D
thiagocsf 4y ago
Sendmail made me think everything in Unix was so scary and esoteric.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  sendmail and bind :)
  - raffraffraff 4y ago
    Shudders. The LPIC exams I took back in 2005 made me think I would spend the next 20 years in vim manually configuring apache, sendmail, bind, openldap and a bunch of other stuff I haven't touched since the exam.
- doubled112 4y ago
  I never did get used to running make on my config files. Or the pain of somebody on the team routinely editing the output files without making the changes on the config files, and never knowing whether it'll work the same when you're done.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > I never did get used to running make on my config files. I worked in a very Make oriented place. If you need to do any processing on files, which not only includes compiling them, but also pushing them to other servers, and loading them into memory on those servers, that should be done with Make. Because Make makes things :) Now I'd rather write a Makefile than use whatever language's builder of the week. Make can make things, why do I need anything else?

rasengan 4y ago

I respect sendmail. Obviously there are other MTAs like djb’s Q mail, postfix as well as newer ones written in Go and Rust. Sure sendmail has had its share of vulnerabilities. But it’s the falls it suffered that made every other MTA strong. Let’s respect the software of the past. It’s the past’s software that built today’s software.

grvgr 4y ago
The future does build on the past. Here's a nugget from Andrew Lee aka rasengan's past: https://gauravgiri.com/for-the-record/a.bad.habit.pdf https://gauravgiri.com/for-the-record/a.bad.habit.pdf And his future: https://twitter.com/grvgr/status/1586942591249141762 https://twitter.com/grvgr/status/1586942591249141762
jsrcout 4y ago
Agree. The hardest thing in the world (besides configuring sendmail) is to remember that other peoples' use cases are not necessarily my use case. The world of email was a whole lot different back when sendmail was created. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#History
- zokier 4y ago
  > The world of email was a whole lot different back when sendmail was created. Sure, email in 80s was different than in the 90s. The problem with sendmail is that it didn't get replaced when it really wasn't a good fit anymore and instead it got dragged on for extra 30 years.
pjc50 4y ago
No. Let it die and stand over the grave to make sure it stays dead. Even 20 years ago there were better alternatives; Debian sensibly defaulted to Exim. It's always been a horrendously difficult to configure monolith.
throw0101c 4y ago
> But it’s the falls it suffered that made every other MTA strong. Worth remembering that Sendmail was, generally speaking, first. Shoulder of giants and all that.

FrostKiwi 4y ago

Really happy to see this cross-pollination in BSD land. Not just DragonFlyBSD getting packages via DeltaPorts, but FreeBSD also getting updates from DragonFly.

stock_toaster 4y ago
Maybe someday npf will be ported to FreeBSD from NetBSD too. I can hope.
- anecdotal1 4y ago
  Can it outperform IPFW?
- cpach 4y ago
  Is it not enough with pf, ipfw and ipfilter? (^_^)
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    Maybe the movies and "he hacked through four firewalls!!!" are correct after all.
    - cpach 4y ago
      Haha! Maybe (:

puyoxyz 4y ago

End of an era

ruslan 4y ago
Previous EoE was when they removed UUCP. PS. I use uucico to automate some offline factory processes for 25+ years.

jabl 4y ago

I've been using dma for some Linux servers in a simple 'smart host only' configuration (that is, all mail is forwarded to some central 'real' MTA), mostly in order to deliver mails from cron. As the commit message notes, DMA is not a full-featured MTA like sendmail or postfix, but rather a minimalistic MTA. Makes sense to have as the default one; those who have a need for a 'real' MTA can install and setup such a thing.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
In hindsight, one can wonder why it's not the default behavior everywhere. After all, most systems need some form of mail, but only basic. The rest can install a fully-featured version easily. It's a win-win situation: increased security for those who don't need a fully-featured MTA and the rest doesn't lose anything.
- jabl 4y ago
  > In hindsight, one can wonder why it's not the default behavior everywhere. Nowadays most Linux distros don't install any MTA by default. Which I think is an entirely valid choice, considering home users, laptop warriors etc. that don't run any services (for the external world) on the machine, and setting up even a simple smarthost type configuration requires putting in some config data during the installation process.
  - zokier 4y ago
    To me the olden way of every server running some email daemon in the background always felt so weird; the only purpose seemed to be a black hole for a things like sudo and cron write their messages to, something surely a simple log file would have sufficed for.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      It saves having every program that might want to send mail from requiring configuration.
    - 4y ago

nix23 4y ago

Oh yes!! That is the right decision!! And maybe also change NTP to DNTPD or NTPsec..maybe?

ysleepy 4y ago

Finally. For, well, decades, the first thing I added to my rc.conf was sendmail_enable=NONE. I think local email is dumb in general though.

ruslan 4y ago

Really bad news! Please keep sendmail default MTA!

nix23 4y ago
Why? But anyway, you can install it from ports if you wish ;)
- ruslan 4y ago
  Of course I can, I can even compile it from source codes, which I sometimes do. :) I use FreeBSD for decades and sendmail was my number one and the only choice of MTA all that time. Not only mine, but all others FreeBSD users I know too. I don't get why would something that works excellent should be changed to something that, well, is just a dummy ? I love sendmail. I think I can cook it quite well, and I don't get why I should change my habits. Not changing habits is one of the major reasons I use FreeBSD these days. Otherwise I would switch to Linux long time ago. Now FreeBSD made one more step towards its death. If someone has prejudice against sendmail adding sendmail_enable="NONE" in rc.conf is easy.
  - nix23 4y ago
    I cant even argue about that mentality of beein so against changes. It's for sending emails...gosh...have you said the same about the git change? Btw if you just used sendmail..always..my condolences.
    - ruslan 4y ago
      Git is so recent comparing to Sendmail. I began using Git for my projects just a couple of years ago. I was die-hard CVS user, switching to Git was a pain for me. Now with Git I've had to employ Linux best practice - update everything once a month or so, which often leads to compatibility problems that have to be resolved. This all eats quite a lot of time, unfortunately.
      - 4y ago

monotux 4y ago

To be fair, dma has been in the base system for a long time. Now (well sometime in the future) I can remove half of my Ansible role for setting up dma on my systems, just skipping disabling sendmail. I learned about dma here, a great blog btw! https://jpmens.net/2020/03/05/simple-solution-for-outgoing-mail-from-a-freebsd-system/ https://jpmens.net/2020/03/05/simple-solution-for-outgoing-m...

anthk 4y ago

A good step in the right direction. FreeBSD has bad defaults, but I hope they can fix them one step at a time.

ape4 4y ago

Are there Linux packages? I'd rather not compile from source since you don't get updates. Thx.

nix23 4y ago
Yes, at least for Arch and Debian (the only two i searched for)

rfmoz 4y ago

Maybe a coincidence, but Eric Allman is the developer of Sendmail [1] and the spouse of Marshall Kirk McKusick, one of the long-serving board members that left the FreeBSD Foundation this summer [2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Allman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Allman [2] - https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/foundation-elects-new-officers-interviews-outgoing-board-members/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/foundation-elects-new-off...

nix23 4y ago
It's especially funny that Marshall said never tell anyone that your are good at writing drivers or sendmail-configuration because that will be your life's destination then ;)
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Heh, similar to "never let your coworkers know you are good with Excel". Or, in non-tech offices, never let anyone know you understand technology at all. I wonder if there's a name for that general sentiment, and how far back comments on that sort of thing go.
  - a1369209993 4y ago
    "The reward for a job well done is usually another job to do. Remember that if you're ever tempted to do a good job of something thankless and unpleasant."
  - toast0 4y ago
    I interviewed somewhere without a resume, because of a referral, but the CEO asked me what I did, so I started at the beginning without thinking... 12 years before I started there, I had worked at a rinky-dink ISP, and before that I did IT at a school district as a student worker.... guess who got to configure mail and manage the domains and own the GSuite account. Bah
loeg 4y ago
McKusick is also known for the filesystem (FFS / UFS). The use of sendmail in FreeBSD isn't exactly a coincidence -- it, too, was developed at Berkeley in the 70s and 80s. And it's probably unsurprising that people meet other people living and working in the same place (grad school).

mnd999 4y ago

I’ve been doing this on my FreeBSD boxes for a while. Great move.

deck4rd 4y ago

I'm a fan of msmtp for this sort of "lightweight" mail sender, since I really only need it for cron notifications and a few hacky scripts. Maybe I'll give dma a spin.