[Mailman-Users] Extremely High Membership lists

J C Lawrence claw at kanga.nu
Thu Jun 29 17:40:30 CEST 2000


On Thu, 29 Jun 2000 10:00:10 +0100 
Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham at VData.co.uk> wrote:

> My belief is that qmail and postfix are more inherently secure
> than sendmail - sendmail is one big chunk that does everything and
> has root privileges, so a compromise tends to take the whole
> machine out.

Aye, that's the argument of architectures.  Postfix and QMail have
architectures that lend themselves to being secure.  That doesn't
mean they are necessarily are, as the very rapid rash of fixes to
both of those products in their early life attests (admittedly
almost all for DoS or mail loss/corruption attacks, not system
access), just that they basically follow the types of designs that
people who do security profressionally tend to prefer (for very good
reasons).

> claw at cp.net said:
>> Note: I'm not aware of a single large scale high volume
>> commercial service on the 'net that runs Sendmail.  Not one.  You
>> can check this youself by telnetting to the SMTP port on their
>> MXes and reading the HELO message.

> Apparently according to the sendmail marketing dweeb I saw a few
> weeks back they have something like 7 of the top 10 ISPs... which
> I don't really believe since it depends how you define things.
> AOL was mentioned... 

AOL is running an in-house developed custom MTA.  I don't know what
the code roots of that MTA are, but I have considerable reason to
think it isn't Sendmail. (They were looking at outsourcing their MTA
business a while ago to a company I was consulting to).

> their MXes give back something rather customised.  

  $ telnet yg.mx.aol.com smtp
  Trying 205.188.156.228...
  Connected to yg.mx.aol.com.
  Escape character is '^]'.
  220-rly-yg04.mx.aol.com ESMTP relay_in.9; Thu, 29 Jun 2000 11:36:03 -0400
  220-America Online (AOL) and its affiliated companies do not
  220-     authorize the use of its proprietary computers and computer
  220-     networks to accept, transmit, or distribute unsolicited bulk
  220      e-mail sent from the internet.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--




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