3 ms·

> postfix & dovecot's 20+ years of legacy cruft That's not my experince - I use postfix and dovecot for years and they are rare examples of high quality softwa

> postfix & dovecot's 20+ years of legacy cruft That's not my experince - I use postfix and dovecot for years and they are rare examples of high quality software to me. I don't see any cruft. They are flexible which make learning and configuration harder compare to opinionated software where most decisions made for you by a developer and you have not choice but to accept them. I myself view sometimes see flexibility as a disadvantage but IMHO they strike a good balance. Postix often criticized by Exim user for not being flexible/configurable enough. And they don't force to use unix accounts, it's just one of options. Having said that I would agree that using a mail server which combines all in one package is easier than unix way with multiple specialized parts combined. For a novice it could be a challenge to stichs (configure) multiple parts together, especially if you don't know how to test each part separately and blidnly follow some how-to. Where you can find plenty of legacy cruft is mail standards and implmenting them correctly is not an esty task that's why I trust Postfix and wary of anything new until it battle tested on a large number of servers.

QuadrupleA 2y ago
You may have just forgotten the pain of the learning curve? Admittedly postfix & dovecot are way more sane than rspamd. But their whole default config (and something like 50% of the options and documentation) are oriented around UNIX system accounts for each of your mail users, which seems insane and 80s-era to me (let's go dial up to the mainframe at 300 baud and see if we have any mail). It takes dozens of pages of documentation to orient yourself away from all that, understand Postfix's "address classes", that you generally want "virtual mailboxes", etc. No support for DKIM, except through sendmail-invented "milters", of which Postfix heartily recommends you to OpenDKIM, a project which hasn't been touched in 10+ years, doesn't support EC signing, is not packaged on most distros, is documented on a outdated non-https site with sparse even more out-of-date plaintext documentation, referring you to a defunct FTP site to download the code, etc. And milter requires setting up a UNIX or inet socket and tedious configuration, etc. etc. Poor support for SASL, at least for mail users looking to god forbid send an email and relay it to the internet, and password-protect against random spammers doing the same, referring you instead to Dovecot SASL - also legacy cruft (partly the SASL protocol designers' fault), SASL has numerous "mechanisms" but nearly everybody uses just the PLAIN mechanism, ensuring a TLS channel is established first, which is about 10 lines of code to implement. Just a ton of unnecessary legacy cruft IMHO.
- account42 2y ago
  > No support for DKIM, except through sendmail-invented "milters", of which Postfix heartily recommends you to OpenDKIM, a project which hasn't been touched in 10+ years, doesn't support EC signing, is not packaged on most distros, is documented on a outdated non-https site with sparse even more out-of-date plaintext documentation, referring you to a defunct FTP site to download the code, etc. And milter requires setting up a UNIX or inet socket and tedious configuration, etc. etc. OpenDKIM has been working fine for me for the last 10+ years. It's also in the default repos of my distro. > Poor support for SASL, at least for mail users looking to god forbid send an email and relay it to the internet, and password-protect against random spammers doing the same, referring you instead to Dovecot SASL - also legacy cruft (partly the SASL protocol designers' fault), SASL has numerous "mechanisms" but nearly everybody uses just the PLAIN mechanism, ensuring a TLS channel is established first, which is about 10 lines of code to implement. SASL works fine for me with Postfix and Dovecot, including sending restricted to authenticated users. Also CRAM-MD5 was recommended over PLAIN everywhere even back when I set this up.

QuadrupleA 2y ago

You may have just forgotten the pain of the learning curve? Admittedly postfix & dovecot are way more sane than rspamd. But their whole default config (and something like 50% of the options and documentation) are oriented around UNIX system accounts for each of your mail users, which seems insane and 80s-era to me (let's go dial up to the mainframe at 300 baud and see if we have any mail). It takes dozens of pages of documentation to orient yourself away from all that, understand Postfix's "address classes", that you generally want "virtual mailboxes", etc. No support for DKIM, except through sendmail-invented "milters", of which Postfix heartily recommends you to OpenDKIM, a project which hasn't been touched in 10+ years, doesn't support EC signing, is not packaged on most distros, is documented on a outdated non-https site with sparse even more out-of-date plaintext documentation, referring you to a defunct FTP site to download the code, etc. And milter requires setting up a UNIX or inet socket and tedious configuration, etc. etc. Poor support for SASL, at least for mail users looking to god forbid send an email and relay it to the internet, and password-protect against random spammers doing the same, referring you instead to Dovecot SASL - also legacy cruft (partly the SASL protocol designers' fault), SASL has numerous "mechanisms" but nearly everybody uses just the PLAIN mechanism, ensuring a TLS channel is established first, which is about 10 lines of code to implement. Just a ton of unnecessary legacy cruft IMHO.

account42 2y ago
> No support for DKIM, except through sendmail-invented "milters", of which Postfix heartily recommends you to OpenDKIM, a project which hasn't been touched in 10+ years, doesn't support EC signing, is not packaged on most distros, is documented on a outdated non-https site with sparse even more out-of-date plaintext documentation, referring you to a defunct FTP site to download the code, etc. And milter requires setting up a UNIX or inet socket and tedious configuration, etc. etc. OpenDKIM has been working fine for me for the last 10+ years. It's also in the default repos of my distro. > Poor support for SASL, at least for mail users looking to god forbid send an email and relay it to the internet, and password-protect against random spammers doing the same, referring you instead to Dovecot SASL - also legacy cruft (partly the SASL protocol designers' fault), SASL has numerous "mechanisms" but nearly everybody uses just the PLAIN mechanism, ensuring a TLS channel is established first, which is about 10 lines of code to implement. SASL works fine for me with Postfix and Dovecot, including sending restricted to authenticated users. Also CRAM-MD5 was recommended over PLAIN everywhere even back when I set this up.