Quoting J C Lawrence (claw@cp.net):

On Wed, 28 Jun 2000 16:23:37 -0700 Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:

...

It's very fashionable to bash sendmail, but sendmail was slogging email around long before anyone else bothered to try. Wtihout sendmail, it's really arguable that the internet would be what it is today.

An excellent point.

Without the Model T, it's very unlikely the road network we have today would have been built either, but that's not an argument for continuing to drive Model Ts.

Sendmail is suffering very heavily from being old code, hacked together when the net was smaller, quieter, and safer than it is today, and with a lot of extra stuff hacked onto it since. We're still seeing exploits based on buffer overruns because the original code used fixed length buffers, and nobody has gone through and ruthlessly rooted out every fixed length buffer in the whole thing. Yes, it's well tested, because it's heavily pounded upon due to its popularity and ubiquitousness, but it's still a creaky old framework with more and more kluges grafted onto it, and hardly a week goes by without another exploit being found.

It's also dog slow compared to postfix, qmail or exim.

-- Paul Tomblin <ptomblin@xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." -- Albert Einstein.

Quoting J C Lawrence (claw@cp.net):

On Wed, 28 Jun 2000 16:23:37 -0700 Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:

...

It's very fashionable to bash sendmail, but sendmail was slogging email around long before anyone else bothered to try. Wtihout sendmail, it's really arguable that the internet would be what it is today.

An excellent point.

Without the Model T, it's very unlikely the road network we have today would have been built either, but that's not an argument for continuing to drive Model Ts.

Sendmail is suffering very heavily from being old code, hacked together when the net was smaller, quieter, and safer than it is today, and with a lot of extra stuff hacked onto it since. We're still seeing exploits based on buffer overruns because the original code used fixed length buffers, and nobody has gone through and ruthlessly rooted out every fixed length buffer in the whole thing. Yes, it's well tested, because it's heavily pounded upon due to its popularity and ubiquitousness, but it's still a creaky old framework with more and more kluges grafted onto it, and hardly a week goes by without another exploit being found.

It's also dog slow compared to postfix, qmail or exim.

-- Paul Tomblin <ptomblin@xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." -- Albert Einstein.