Sendmail was developed in the early 80s to be bug-compatible with crappy bespoke email systems of the time, as well as long-dead protocols like decmail and what

Sendmail was developed in the early 80s to be bug-compatible with crappy bespoke email systems of the time, as well as long-dead protocols like decmail and whatnot. It made a lot of decisions in that context that were sensible at the time, but that have become a lot less sensible as the world and ecosystem has changed over the last 40 years. Sendmail is not dead, but its glory days are over. 30 years ago the entire world was running on Sendmail, but this already started shifting 20 years ago, and today Sendmail operates a tiny minority of the world's email servers. If you want to keep running Sendmail: great! Go for it! But it's just not a sensible default any more. The art of picking defaults is choosing something that will work for most people with a minimal surface for footguns. And Sendmail is clearly not it. I appreciate you don't want to "change your habits" – I usually don't want to either – but FreeBSD does not revolve around you.