Andrew Brown said:

>meanwhile...i like it and i've tamed the savage beast.  the
>configuration file is only obtuse to those that don't understand it.
>think of it like a device drive for an ethernet card written in
>assembly language as viewed by someone who has only coded in basic.
>it's *bound* to look obtuse.

Exactly. Sendmail is not that bad considering what it does, one would
expect a fairly complex config file. I think that the M4 stuff makes it
a lot easier than it was in the past for the uninitiated.

The config files on my machines running 8.8.8 are heavily hacked to keep
out the spam.

>>Postfix looks like a pretty darned reasonable alternative to me, but
>>unfortunately while we failed to include it in our OS, and thus lost
>>whatever leverage we might have had, its license became unacceptable,
>>too.

>so take an older revision and start from that?  that *was* what weitse
>had in mind in the first place anyway...that people would take what he
>put out and run with it (in possibly different directions).

I recently put postfix-19991231 on one of my NetBSD/sparc machines. I don't
see anything really objectionable about the license. It seems like a good
mail system, but I really haven't stressed it.

I had qmail running awhile back on a Sun 3/60 running NetBSD/sun3. I used
it as a small maillist machine and was impressed with it's performance,
but it haf extremely obtuse log files.

>just like the c compiler or the tool chain, i'd expect.  i happen to
>think that sendmail's fine and i have no great desire to relearn how
>to do everything that i'm currently doing with sendmail in another
>package.  while the issues with the licence have been referred to as
>objectionable, no one has yet given me an objective comparison of the
>licences in question.

And when you think about it, sendmail is actually the software by which
other mailers are judged. Most come up lacking in feature set.
-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com