[H-GEN] Replacement?

[Greg Black]

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"Rick Phillips" wrote:

| Yes, I feel a religious war coming on.

I don't think there's any need to go that far.

There was a time when sendmail was the de facto MTA for Unix
systems and it was also (because of its history and origins)
full of security holes and other bugs.

Some time later, qmail was created to address the weaknesses in
sendmail.  And later still vmailer was created to allow its
author to address the same concerns in a different way and to
provide its author with a tool to conduct his war with qmail's
author.  Still later, vmailer was renamed postfix.

While all this was happening, the sendmail author (and others)
started to bring sendmail into the modern world, a task which
has now been completed.

If, like me, you needed a good MTA some years ago you really
needed to go to qmail (as I did).  Had I been able to wait for
vmailer/postfix to be ready for prime time, I would probably
have chosen it instead.  But, if I was starting this all over
again now, I would use sendmail, because it is now reliable and
reasonably bug-free and reasonably fast -- and it's just there.
And, of course, there's more information around about sendmail
than about all the others combined, not to mention the support
for supplementary functions (e.g., to help out with the fight
against spam).

The truth is that we all very lucky that there are three MTAs
available and that they are all efficient, reliable and with a
generally good reputation -- multiple implementations of all
security and important infrastructure protocols provide us with
a useful defence against single points of failure in the wider
networks that we rely upon.

Greg

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