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Postfix is fine, much better than sendmail. However I have to admit I always had a hard time thinking in the same manner that postfix operated. Something about

by somat 3y ago

Postfix is fine, much better than sendmail. However I have to admit I always had a hard time thinking in the same manner that postfix operated. Something about the list based implied logic hurts my head. Speaking of sendmail it always fascinated me, in the same manner as a train wreak. See sendmail is very nearly a completely generic store and forward engine and is configured such that it speaks smtp. Nobody really wanted a generic engine, they wanted an smtp engine and all the generic configuration was cryptic and getting in the way. so the standard method for actually configuring sendmail was a set of m4 convenience macros. The end result was you needed a configuration language for your... configuration language. Nether one of which was really any good. It sort of reminds me of those CSS compilers. or perhaps latex.

kjs3 3y ago
Nobody really wanted a generic engine, they wanted an smtp engine No, when sendmail was king of the hill, the whole world wasn't SMTP, so being able to mung addresses 'generically' and deliver messages between wildly different, non-RFC822 schemes was critical functionality. Sure, that's not how things are now, but you have to consider the context when it was created.
arp242 3y ago
Sendmail originated in the late 70s/early 80s when there were tons of incompatible systems like DECNet and whatnot, instead of just SMTP, and all of them had all sorts of buggy implementations. Today "SMTP" is analogous with "email", but that wasn't always the case. Sendmail won because it could talk to all of them, in bug-compatible ways. Later this feature became more of a liability than anything else and people unfamiliar with the original context are left scratching their heads and going "wtf is this shit?! Maybe those Berkley people really were on LSD?!", but it was a hugely critical feature and without it Sendmail never would have gained the adoption it did – it really was tons better than anything else.

by somat 3y ago

kjs3 3y ago

Nobody really wanted a generic engine, they wanted an smtp engine No, when sendmail was king of the hill, the whole world wasn't SMTP, so being able to mung addresses 'generically' and deliver messages between wildly different, non-RFC822 schemes was critical functionality. Sure, that's not how things are now, but you have to consider the context when it was created.

arp242 3y ago

Sendmail originated in the late 70s/early 80s when there were tons of incompatible systems like DECNet and whatnot, instead of just SMTP, and all of them had all sorts of buggy implementations. Today "SMTP" is analogous with "email", but that wasn't always the case. Sendmail won because it could talk to all of them, in bug-compatible ways. Later this feature became more of a liability than anything else and people unfamiliar with the original context are left scratching their heads and going "wtf is this shit?! Maybe those Berkley people really were on LSD?!", but it was a hugely critical feature and without it Sendmail never would have gained the adoption it did – it really was tons better than anything else.